As Good As It Gets
One man's quest to carve out a good living.
May, 2003

Just when it seems like everybody you know is sharpening their elbows in the great national Race to the Bottom of the Toilet, you run across a guy who didn't even fill out the entry form. Grayson Chesser lives in Virginia on the Eastern Shore, the narrow spit of land separating the Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic Ocean. Near as he can tell, his people landed a few miles down the beach in the 1600s and never found a good reason to leave. He lives on land farmed by his great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather.

"You could make a good living here for quite a long time, you know,-¿ he says. "Chesapeake was good for fishing, crabbing, oystering. The soil was rich. And the waterfowl hunting was as good as anywhere on earth.-¿ Chesser went to Old Dominion University, got a degree in business, and was in the process of losing his shirt farming when he decided to go into decoy carving and guiding full-time.

The decision paid off. Chesser isn't trading in his 12-year-old truck anytime soon, but he's not going back to farming, either. He sells a lot of the 200 or so decoys he makes each year to hunters he guides, as well as on his website (www.chesserdecoys.com). Lately, most are sold before he even gets around to carving them. Collectors snap up a lot, but about 20 percent are bought by guys who have the audacity to put them in the water and hunt over them, as Chesser does himself.

Chesser's decoys-"which he carves in species from teal to Canadas-"are made of pine, cedar, and other types of wood. (You may remember wood, that hard, fibrous stuff that was once used to make bows, boats, rifle stocks, fishing lures, and countless other needful things. It's now used primarily to frame town houses on what was recently hunting property.)

"It's nice to win ribbons,-¿ he says of the contemporary carving scene. "But it's nothing compared to watching some bird-"that was maybe born up near the Arctic Circle and can go anywhere in the world it wants-"cup its wings and come in to the decoys you made. That's all I ever really wanted out of life, to be able to carve and see that, and to hunt and guide.-¿

It's healthy to do work you love. At 56, Chesser's black hair is untouched by gray. The lower part of his face is permanently tanned. His forehead, usually shielded by his cap, is as white as milk. His mind is quick but his speech is slow, and his movements slower still. There is about him the aura of a historically misplaced person, someone who one day woke to find himself in the 21st century, cut his eyes left and right, and decided the best move was not to let it bother him too much.

Chesser killed his first duck at the age of 12 over three of his father's old decoys, including one made of papier-m¿¿ch¿¿ that had a broken bill. "That was it for me,-¿ he remembers. "Hunting over decoys was addictive-"like how people talk about their first hit of crack.-¿

This was about 1960, just as plastic decoys were replacing wood. The boy began hanging around a number of old carvers, including Miles Hancock, born in 1888, a former market hunter, guide, and all-round waterman. Hancock made a deceptively crude, flat-bottomed decoy that was wonderful to hunt over. "A lot of decoys look good on a mantel but dead once you put them in the water,-¿ Chesser explains. "His didn't.-¿

The old-time carvers like Hancock were more than teachers to the boy; they were his heroes. "It was like a kid today meeting sports celebrities. These guys didn't have much book learning, but they'd studied the bay their whole lives. And I thought they were wealthy as kings because they loved their work. One day in his shop, Miles leaned over and said, -¿Grayson, don't ever do something for money that you wouldn't do for free.'

"I've never forgotten that.-¿