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The first time Keith Williams went backyard snorkeling he chose Elk Creek, an easy 15-minute drive from where he lived in Cecil County, MD.

It was a degraded, heavily urbanized trickle of a creek with sewer outfalls, litter and heavily eroding stream banks. “I thought, ‘I shouldn’t even be here,’” he recalled.

Yet once he dropped his facemask below the surface, a new, surprisingly complex world opened up. A lot of small fish known as shiners came up to stare at him. Even a few juvenile eels, or elvers, came into view.

“It was amazing,” he said. “The diversity, the beauty rivaled the things I saw in the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. When we look at a river from our perspective, we don’t see anything. It just looks like this muddy water or reflective plane. But when you stick your face in there, there’s all this life that’s hidden from view. There’s all this intricacy and behaviors going on. It’s mind-boggling.”

The experience was the first ripple in a lifelong passion for snorkeling in freshwater rivers and streams at all times of the year, even at night and under the ice. Williams said it’s taken him into a world of colorful and varied fish, spectacles of light and the caressing sounds of shifting currents — even in streams so shallow that they don’t cover his whole body.

Down below, Williams said, are diverse forms of aquatic life such as fish, crayfish, frogs, snakes, hellbenders, aquatic insects, freshwater mussels, sponges or undulating underwater grasses.

He’s written two books on the subject: Snorklehead: Adventures in Creek Snorkeling, a first-person chronicle of his adventures, and Snorkeling Rivers and Streams: An Aquatic Guide to Underwater Discovery and Adventure, which is more of a how-to and where-to book. He’s working on a third.

But Williams doesn’t just want to turn people of all ages on to the wonders of snorkeling. On a broader scale, Williams has made the ease and affordability — a serviceable snorkel and mask can be had for $20 — and accessibility of local streams the core of a grassroots environmental lesson for youth and adults alike.

“It’s to expose people to the beauty of our freshwater systems in hopes that they will act to protect that diversity and beauty,” he said.

Protection of freshwater ecosystems is a pressing need across the country, he maintains. “We’re losing it here. It’s not just these exotic places around the planet.”

As part of a program run by the U.S. Forest Service, Williams has introduced snorkeling programs in schools from southeastern states to Puerto Rico. In Maryland, thousands of students have been turned on to snorkeling through NorthBay, a nonprofit outdoor-education program and retreat for Baltimore students at a facility leased from Elk Neck State Park in the upper part of the Bay. Williams was the founding education director of NorthBay and later its executive director.

A former biologist with the U.S. Army, the 57-year-old Williams has taught science in Baltimore City schools and been a senior education manager for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Representing the Maryland Department of Education, he worked with the government of China to introduce outdoors programs for schools.

He currently serves as the community engagement coordinator for the Lancaster Conservancy in Pennsylvania, where he occasionally leads small-stream snorkeling in the group’s nature preserves. He now lives in Lancaster County.

A part-time rescue diver, Williams snorkels just about every month of the year.

Nighttime, though presenting some obstacles, pays off with views of more-active fish. He wears wet and dry suits when the water is cold. “There are seasons underwater that we don’t even think of and we really don’t know much about,” he says of winter snorkeling, sometimes under the ice. He’s still trying to find out where hognose suckers disappear to in winter. 

Some of the most colorful fish — think brook trout and rosy-sided dace — live in small streams. He’s been ignored and enveloped by migrating shad, eels and herring. He once looked on in sadness and admiration as a spawning-spent chinook salmon, ensuring another generation, rested against the lee fold of his knee and breathed its last.

Bluegill, seeing their reflections in Williams’ mask, have attacked him. Smallmouth bass, when he was too close to nests, have fearlessly driven him away.

Williams has learned the patience of being immobile and letting the underworld unfold. He has even heard fish feeding on the stream bottom.

That passivity sometimes unnerves passersby. More than once they have called the police to a report a body floating in a waterway.

And more than once the conversation with puzzled onlookers has gone like this:

“What are you looking for?” they ask.

“I’m not looking for anything. I’m watching stuff.”

Here is a sampling of Williams’ favorite Chesapeake Bay waterways for snorkeling:

• North Creek, headwaters to the James River near Buchanan, VA, which has a good population of a colorful fish called the mountain redbelly dace
• Principio Creek in Cecil County, MD, with a variety of darters and migratory river herring
• Fishing Creek in York County, PA, to look for spottail shiners where it empties into the Susquehanna River
• Deer Creek in Conowingo, MD, which is good for viewing sculpin
• McKee’s Half Falls on the Susquehanna River in Port Treverton, PA, where crayfish abound below the falls

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