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    Life's Horizon

    Interspersed among the always popular stories of its history, there was plenty of contemporary Southern Maryland News as well.

    The Chesapeake Bay was national news. Sailboat enthusiast Walter Cronkite lent his face to posters and headlined panel discussions to Save the Bay, including visits to Solomons Island and St. Mary’s City, well within the parameters of my radio beat.

    Southern Maryland environmentalists won dramatic courtroom battles. One forced the State of Maryland to halt pollution pouring from sewage treatment plants into the Patuxent River. Another overturned government approvals for an oil refinery in Piney Point on the Potomac.

    St. Mary’s County itself boasted three Superfund sites.

    News of the week and news of the 350th  proved remarkably similar: Who owned the land and what they were doing with it.

    I trolled county commission and land planning meetings in the evenings. Spent days roaming a countryside peppered with the last active generation of farmers, watermen and descendants of the European landing. I gathered from them all fresh quotes telling over and over that greatest of stories, the battle to save things lost.

    There weren’t a lot of perks with the $200 a week job that started at 4:30 a.m., but there were a few. Most days I was done well before noon, supervision was light and WPTX did not recognize conflicts of interest, so junkets offered were junkets accepted. Admittedly, junkets in local radio were limited. The one notable enough to be remembered an opportunity to fly in a small private plane with a couple of county commissioners to visit jails around the state.

     “Look at all those trees,” insisted Commission President George Aud, as the plane took off from the asphalt runway of the county airport. “There’re so many trees you don’t see any houses at all,” he marveled. “I don’t know what those goddamn environmentalist-nuts keep squawkin’ about. Look at all those trees.”

    Local environmentalists, emboldened from their river wins, were stalling approvals of new housing developments with lawsuits and protests. Scores of significant rezoning applications drew vocal crowds to these meetings week after week. There seemed no end to plans to carve up the swaths of forest and farms of St. Mary’s.

    Just as state activities fought to Save the Bay, locals fought to save the Rural Character of St. Mary’s County. And the officials all seemed flummoxed at the change in pattern.

    County government, long in happy partnership with the Lexington Park businessmen, was stymied by the sudden emergence of opposition to what had been, since its arrival in 1634, the whole purpose of European settlement upon the Mother County’s shores. There were still hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tracts of land capable of handling Julius Caesar’s version of a successful hundred-family subdivision.

    Indeed, from the plane, forests and farm fields covered the landscape, stretched to the rippling miles of shoreline. It was an Impressionist’s dreamscape, myriad shades of green bordered by sparkling sapphire water and dotted with barns and boats. The County was rife with Rural Character.

    “I just don’t understand it.” George Aud gave his gargled and querulous heh-heh laugh of genuine puzzlement and leaned back in his seat to a few more dry chuckles meant to convey his bewilderment rather than amusement.

    The battles straining the commissioner’s understanding were not whether or not to preserve that character; everybody wanted Rural Character back then. Same as everybody wanted to Save the Bay. The on-the-ground, in-the-courtroom battles were over what, exactly, defined rural character. Over what, exactly, could drain into the bay and how much. Exactly.

    The war proved to, instead, be over what, exactly, we were saving the bay for and how deep, exactly, must rural character extend to exude it.

    It seems as naive now as Santa Claus sleeping on Ernie Bell’s sofa, but in 1984 the players and observers believed it was merely a matter of getting the rules written in a way that would save the bay and preserve the landscape without impacting anyone’s property rights or property taxes.

    My definitive yardstick presented itself during one afternoon history lessons with Bobby Wentworth. Driving through November’s fields of broken and sparse harvested cornstalks he pulled off the farm road we were touring and excused himself to step to the back tire. “Now that’s the benefit of living in the country,” he sighed upon his relieved return.

    I burst out laughing. A man can pee as easily in a city alley. But when a woman can hop out at the side of a road and pee, that’s rural character.

    In June, when Marisa and I first reached St. Mary’s, Beaufort was a night or two behind us. We crossed the Potomac River from Virginia and upon the crest of the big hill on Route 234 Marisa announced we had arrived.

    A good decade later the vista was unchanged and still so strikingly exemplary of the Americana rural landscape I wrote an ode to it, a newspaper column printed upon the occasion of it passing into the zoning category that would ultimately permit the subdivision settling there today. Then, 10 years after my arrival, more than 10 years ago, such a vista was  becoming unique.

    Not, however, the day Marisa and I arrived.  It was a Norman Rockwell landscape if such a thing exists. But it was little to me.  A couple thousand miles of rural character had passed through the windshield by the time the VW made the crest of that hill. What stays with me of my first day in St. Mary’s County, was that night. That was something entirely different.

    After more than 2,000 miles in the VW, I slipped into the deep backseat of Marisa’s 1974 turquoise Cadillac, cushioned in soft white leather. From her home place across dark county roads it was the better part of an hour before we reached Piney Point.

    It was deliciously dark, like being wrapped in velvet. Occasionally a tiny light would appear across vast darkened fields. It would prove the porch light of a farmhouse or a barn’s single bulb reflected off a tin funnel shaped shade. Each light faded in our wake and left us for some minutes more in the dark before another tiny beam would pierce the side window.

    We would have passed three local gas stations, two closed; a liquor store; three bars, two offering “off sales” as well. One of the bars would have been a black bar. Not the one of the three well enough lit to tell from the car it was a bar.

    There would have been and still are three Catholic churches, one Episcopal Church; one apiece designated “Historic” and one AME.

    Everything else was farm.

    The sky lightened to gray the result of a bubble of former military tract houses as we entered Piney Point.  Marisa gestured toward a dual-towered five-story set of lights standing in a pool of dark across the street from the houses.

    “The hotel,” she said.

    The carload laughed. “First elevator in Piney Point,” a sister’s boyfriend told me.

    “Nice bar,” Marisa said to agreement. “It’s a skipjack,” she said to me. “The bar is shaped like the prow of a skipjack.”

    The hotel was for union officials, dignitaries and up-graders attending the Harry Lundeberg School of Seamanship, Marisa’s alma mater. The Seafarer’s International Union had bought the Navy’s World War II torpedo testing facility to build their school to train Merchant Marines.  

    A quarter mile south of the school a banner stretched across the road that read, “Swann’s Pier, in Downtown Piney Point,” in wide and tall script. The road beyond crowned into blackness. We parked on the shoulder.

    Two electrical poles secured the banner, each stuck in the asphalt parking lots flanking the road.  We spilled out onto a wide and dry grassy ditch off the shoulder of asphalt crumbs, a trio of women, in tight jeans, guffawing as we stumbled a few feet down the ditch before gaining footing in the parking lot of the US Post Office, Piney Point, Maryland 20674. We kept laughing as we tumbled across the empty road, ahead of us a single light bulb beneath an inverted metal cone. It was the last light on in downtown Piney Point.

    “The old hotel,” Marisa said as we weaved through a parking lot of cars toward the single light. We stopped suddenly and fell silent to stare at an old wooden building lining the side of the lot. Indeed, as my eyes carved it from darkness, it looked exactly like a falling down hotel. It was wooden and without light, clearly abandoned, the windows not boarded but aged into opaqueness. “Swann’s Hotel,” said a brother.

    It had been pretty, in its time, easily half a century ago. Its gingerbread was largely intact, but irredeemable, cracked and disintegrating into mold and dust. A few columns stood upright but the porch sagged its full length, shingles from the corner nearest the road slid in a tarpaper waterfall to the ground.

    Ahead, on a cinderblock building at the end of the lot, beneath the single light, a sign with white, decorative script, in better repair read,  “Swann’s Hotel & Store. On and Off Sales. Groceries.”

    Marisa led us through the gap between the hotel and the cinderblock grocery store onto a wooden planked wharf that ran far into a suddenly appearing water.

    “The Chesapeake Bay?” I asked.

   “St. George’s Creek,” the boyfriend educated me.

    The tension in the planked steps buoyed us upward and suddenly the silent night bulged with sound as the band began a set. The music and the sway turned us giddy again.

      “The toilets hang right over the water,” Marisa yelled in my ear as she opened the door and the band doubled in volume. The air temperature dropped by 10 degrees despite a crowd that filled the bar stools, a dozen tables, a pool table off to the side and a small dance floor. There probably wasn’t another Dit-Dot in the place.

    It was a lot going on after the long ride through the empty night, but that shimmying pier of the Swann’s bar was even then merely the remains. Swann’s was swinging when the steamboats ruled and the luxury hotels down the Potomac served a well-heeled vacationing crowd from Baltimore and D.C.

    “You’d have to elbow your way down the wharf when the boats came in,”  Floyd Thompson told my  daughters well more than a decade after I’d arrived in St. Mary’s. Floyd would sit on the front porch of their ice cream shop in the waning years of the last  century and talk about its early decades.

    That ice cream shop, like the rest of Piney Point, went broke one of the last summers of that century, the summer the last of the Swann’s hotel burned to the water’s edge.

    Just months before that finality, Floyd Thompson would sit on the ice cream shop porch during one of the slow Piney Point summers of our daughters’ middle school years and tell them of the steamboat years. “I was just a boy,” he’d say to them. “Well, older than you,” he’d say and glance over to Jackie and me as we sat outside the shop, watching little traffic down the state road dwindle even further.

    I don’t think Jackie Russell was in Swann’s my first night in town. I think Marisa would have said or at least later claim she had introduced us.

    Nor did I make it to the bathrooms that first night. It wasn’t queasiness at Marisa’s claim just that the lines extended too far to meet the need. We ran holding ourselves tightly and laughing as we crossed the parking lot and the road and squatted in a line to pee along the privacy of the leeward side of Marisa’s Cadillac. We giggled and perched carefully in a little line of women teetering at the top of the ditch before the Piney Point post office. I peed contentedly off the side of the highway and would have rested my eyes, filled at that moment with profound release, upon the horizon of the rest of my life, to be dramatic about it. But the berm was too high. And, of course, only in hindsight are coincidences coincidental. That night I didn’t even know there was a river over the rise. That night I climbed back in the Caddie and we made our way back to Marisa’s, another river away.

    Only years later the coincidence struck me, that my first night in St. Mary’s I not merely visited, but marked the post office of my daughters’ hometown.

    The sudden remembrance flooded back in a puff of velvet air through my car window passing the post office on my way home from a late planning commission meeting I’d covered for the Enterprise newspaper.  The same breeze had given me pause from my giggling by Marisa’s long gone Cadillac. It is an oddly dry breeze for an island. It had felt something like velvet rubbed up my arm, against its grain, against my grain, but soft.

    I returned to St. Mary’s in the fall, moved into Marisa’s sister’s spare bedroom where, those first winters, I could lie in my borrowed bed and see the skipjacks sliding back and forth across the mouth of the Patuxent in the Chesapeake Bay.

    This was the Patuxent, a different river entirely than the Potomac. Land was higher over here, both geologically and on the tax rolls.

    From the river’s western lip, where the skipjacks worked in the winter, Navy test pilots took off across their restricted airspace above the Chesapeake.

    On the eastern lip was Solomons Island, still, in 1984, looking like a Lionel train village complete with a farm, an old hotel, a handful of gingerbread houses and a little white church, its spire the longest reflection in the water.

    Inside the island was a natural safe harbor. Sailboats were joining the working fleet at the docks. Maybe even Walter Cronkite’s sailboat visited, but probably not. Solomons, then, was still a long way from D.C.  The highways had not yet dualized.

    A few restaurants were starting up, harbingers of all that has since arrived, but then they ringed only the harbor, they were inside, out of sight. Weeknights the island held no lights at all. The whole Milky Way splayed across the night sky and fell upon Marisa’s yard.

    On Solomons’ back road the University of Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Lab was already defining itself as the scientific edge in Saving the Bay. Walter Cronkite would arrive with his panel within the next few months. And if “Save the Bay” hadn’t come into common usage yet, it had no doubt already been coined, perhaps already printed on bumper stickers by the time I became Southern Maryland News.

    In the winter mornings I’d returned from the station and see the skipjack fleet sailing out my doorway upon the Bay.  It was a genuine fleet back then and from this distance looking choreographed, the last commercial sailing fleet of North America.

    It was for them and for all they represented that we would save the bay. Whatever that was that they represented. Whatever Save the Bay was. Whatever rural character was.

    I waved my arms in the air at the end of the long dock off Marisa’s shore, miles from the skipjacks that sailed in stark relief upon the bay.  I cannot conceive, today, that I thought Jackie Russell would see me. But I am sure I thought that. I thought perhaps he would sail to my dock for a cup of coffee. I thought so many things. I knew nothing.

    I did not know that those on shore are nearly invisible, so small from the sights of the boats that dominate their horizon.

    It still happens sometimes in June, the velvet air, sometimes in the mornings as well, right after the dew lifts, just that very moment it lifts and before the sun turns the marsh muggy.  It will be there sometimes on my morning walks just before the turnaround where I can tuck into the marsh grass and pee if I need.

    That’s the only place left on the island where a woman can duck behind bushes and pee. Even St. George Island has only that little turnaround of rural character. All the rest has turned into lawns.