Time for another one of these. (The book’s prologue and introduction are here, as well as a lengthy recent personal intro from yours truly.) It can be a scary thing to reread all these words (some of them 10 years old), see my psyche preserved in amber, and ponder where it all has gotten me — but that’s a subject for other books and essays.
The 184-page book (© 2005) is divided into sections: Maryland, My Maryland; New Mexico Project; San Cristobal; Hard Journeys; Taos; and Awakenings, all of it for sale at Booklocker.com, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble if you can’t wait. I’ve posted another gorgeous image from our early days in San Cristobal on the page with the full post, and there’s another shot as well. (An online perk, as the paperback, alas, did not allow for photos.) This first chapter sets the whole thing up, by way of truth and rationalizing. Please enjoy!
Part I: Maryland, My Maryland
Chapter 1: Imprinting
For me, nature has always been key. All my life I’ve been pulled, guided, and enthralled by nature. When I was a boy it was a mud puddle that lasted long enough to grow tadpoles, or better yet (and most incredibly) a pond, seething with life and brimming with mystery, or woods with trees to climb and look out from. The main thing was to get away from the houses and the people and find the other things — animals, plants, secret shrines of nature — things I could only see if I went “exploring,” as I called it.
Nature still has a fighting chance here on the Eastern Shore, and more than a few of those shrines, but who knows for how long? I had lived many places before moving to the town where my grandmother lived. Here I played the role of “native outsider” for over twenty years. I was a local when it suited me or a Texan when the need arose, but in many ways I was more of a native than I usually thought.
I even lived here for a brief period or two when I was a boy, usually during times when my Air Force father was off being macho somewhere in the world. My mother and I sometimes stayed with her family in Baltimore or with my grandparents, at first in Sudlersville and later in Chestertown. Later we lived for a time at Andrews Air Force Base and in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and in those years the family made frequent visits to the Eastern Shore.
At Andrews I used to go out into the “wilderness” behind the apartment building. This was a large wooded area with a broad stream flowing through it, where I could catch crayfish in the clear, clean water flowing over speckled gravel. I would put them in a bucket, look at them for a while, then let them go. Those expeditions to the creek were incredibly intense and engrossing, and probably the most exciting thing a five-year-old could do. In my mind’s eye, I could still see it all quite clearly and even follow the path from the stream to our back door.
I remember solitary walks through my grandparents’ neighborhood, down Campus Avenue and over to my uncle’s house. There were cornfields then instead of houses, and during winter visits I could walk through the stubble all the way down to the marsh. In the summers my cousin and I would capture any small animals we could find. Once we found an exhausted bat clinging to a tree trunk after a thunderstorm — we put it in a shoebox and examined it for a while, then let it go in the evening after proudly showing it off to our assembled parents.
I remember going to nearby Tolchester on the bay, where my father rowed me around in a rented skiff. I remember the salty tang of the water and the pungent odors of the old wooden boat. There was seaweed then, great wads of green, all over the beach, and many, many shells, but virtually no trash, in the days of millions of oysters, back before the Bay Bridge killed the ferry boats and made the Eastern Shore safe for real estate developers and outlet malls. This was when the water was clear.
When I unexpectedly found myself in Chestertown again in 1975, during a hiatus in my planned move from Texas to Maine, it was as if I had blundered into a post-hippie nature-lover’s paradise. A person could rent a house in the country, maybe even on the water, for so little money it hurts to remember. One of the first things I did that fall was go out to Bloomfield Farm to pick walnuts. There I got to know the tall bluffs and the wide Sassafras River, and later I would return on a regular basis to go skinny-dipping. So did Kathy after we got together. You either had to be friends with whoever was renting the main house or know how to sneak down to the water, but it was always worth it.
I spent what seemed like years on the water. When we lived in Pomona, I would go sailing from the nearby landing on the Chester River every couple of days in the summer and fall. Later at Castle Hill Farm where I loved it so much, out there in the real Eastern shore wilderness, I made the creek and the river my second home. Kathy and I would take Chris’ grandfather’s wooden boat, powered very benignly by an antique twin-cylinder 5 horsepower outboard, up the river to the college boat dock or the foot of High Street to get the Sunday papers. The trip would take about 45 minutes each way. Kathy would laze across the bow reading the NY Times Magazine and getting a tan. The journey always reminded me of scenes from “The African Queen,” minus the leeches, and despite the fact that Katherine Hepburn didn’t bare her bosom to the sun the way my honey did.
In our present home we’ve been very close to nature and had seen just about everything there is to see in these parts: deer, turkeys, geese, foxes, raccoons, woodchucks, skunks, squirrels, mice, voles, snakes, lizards, eagles, hawks, quail, pheasants, herons, ducks, flying squirrels, shrews, bats, owls, frogs, and a dead weasel. One morning I saw a female pheasant walk across the front yard like she owned it.
That, and the interaction with my friends, is most of what I’ve loved about living here. I don’t relate to the old Colonial culture in these parts, but I care about the swans I see fly over in November. I care about the glorious gold and pink sunsets we get on cold clear winter evenings. I care about the fox running across the road. I also care about the fact that on my summer walking route, I no longer see the indigo buntings that used to fly along a certain stretch of country lane, because a thoughtless newcomer bulldozed the hedgerow. If he had only been able to see that even a tiny alteration would permanently alter everything.
The Chesapeake Bay itself is on the edge of destruction because of all the people living on its shores and the things we people do. There’s simply no way to reconcile this much development and a viable environment, no way at all, despite the constant activist fervor. There are already far too many of us living here, flushing our toilets, fertilizing our lawns, cutting down more trees, and throwing away the plastic junk that ends up strangling fish or on the beach. We have bigger toys, less respect for Mother Earth, and do far more physical damage than pre-bulldozer societies were ever able to manage.
Make no mistake about it, this is still a beautiful land. If you come there from Philadelphia or New York, it seems as rural as can be. But after growing up nearby and living here for 25 years, I’ve become someone who knew it in “the good old days” — better to take my childhood memories of a pristine Bay surrounded by quiet fields and fade into the sunset.
I yearn for a landscape closer to the one God gave us and wonder how hard I could fight to save what’s left here if I were to stay. Most of the time I’ve been truly happy here, after all, and the Chesapeake Bay — polluted or not — will still be there long after I’m gone. But natural spaces in this part of the world too often have a sad, desperate quality to them, as if they sense their fragility in the path of the encroaching megalopolis. Maybe if enough people acknowledged the sacredness of nature and acted to change their lives, we could hold off the inevitable a bit longer. Nature is still magnificent in the far corners of this place, and that is where my heart has been.
For now, I salute the best of those I leave behind for now, the true nature-loving, rural, hipster iconoclasts, living here as long as they can in their natural enclaves, like tadpoles giving it a go in a slowly-drying puddle. I will always count myself among your number, brothers and sisters, and I truly wish you well.
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