My Clean Water Story: Keith Bollt

While I grew up in northern New York, the first fish I ever caught was in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Specifically, it was a bluegill sunfish hooked with a piece of Kraft American cheese, at dusk in a manmade pond near our house in Arnold, Maryland. Undoubtedly, my brother and I put the fish in a bucket, ran up the hill to show Mom, then released it back to the pond and went to bed. Unbeknownst to me, the pond was just down the road from the Chesapeake Bay Program Office where I would be working some 20-odd years later.

Not long after that catch, my family moved away from Maryland to a small college town in upstate New York, near the Adirondack Mountains. That’s where I grew up—the closest city was in Canada, the winter temperatures would occasionally hit 30 below, and I walked in the snow uphill to school both ways (I lived halfway down the other side of a small hill). My brothers and I used to cross country ski race when we were little, and a kid in my class became an NHL player. Did I mention it was cold?

We have great summers up there too; low humidity and lots of forests for hiking and running, quiet roads with wide shoulders (because of winter snow) for cycling, and rivers, lakes, ponds and streams for fishing and kayaking. A large, dammed river called the Raquette River runs through my hometown, and somewhere along the line I picked up a love of fly fishing. My dad is not a fisherman, but he instilled in my brothers and me an enthusiasm for being active and outdoors.

When I was 12 years old, I learned the word “ichthyologist”, or fish scientist, and decided that I wanted to become one. I fly-fished my ways through my teenage summers, catching trout, bass, pike and sunfish, and occasionally getting to travel outside of the state to fish. I’m still exploring new places to fish; for example, I went fly fishing for bonefish in Honduras this year. I look forward to many more fishy adventures in the years ahead—it’s a lifelong love and journey.

My passion for the outdoors followed me to college. On a college tour of Cornell University, while meeting with a professor to learn more about their environmental science program, he asked if I wanted to see something cool, and then opened a drawer at his desk full of otoliths (basically fish ears). I remember in that moment being literally startled by clarity because I could see myself going there.

In college, I became inspired to work for the federal government after interning for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, where I was surrounded by smart, dedicated and passionate public servants. I also became interested through my coursework in environmental law and policy. I thought about becoming an environmental lawyer but decided to get a master’s degree in environmental management from Duke University.

I got hired to my first ever “real job” out of graduate school, which was at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a project manager overseeing the cleanup of Superfund hazardous waste sites. I realized I hadn’t quite found my niche yet, and so in 2022 I took an opportunity to join EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program Office.

All these years later, I’m back in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, exploring some of the region’s best trout streams, eating blue crab and working for a partnership with a variety of environmental goals. I think the younger me would agree that the people and work in the Bay Program are inspiring, and that it is a great place to keep writing my clean water story.