Wing Commander
Rich Smoker, a sixty-eight-year-old Maryland decoy carver, says he never begins work on one of his coveted birds until he actually feels a visualization of it bubble up inside him. “I have to be inspired,” he says. “That’s the biggest part of the entire process.”
Inspiration, as it turns out, is all around him. Smoker’s home and woodshop are on an island in the Big Annemessex River on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore, right in the middle of the Atlantic Flyway,
