“Guys Like You and Me”

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There was a lot to like about our old place in the country, oh yes.

Purchased back in ’89 on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, its narrow 2.57 acres stretched out over a thousand feet, ending in a patch of woods I loved to explore, re-acquainting myself with plants and flowers of my childhood: jack-in-the-pulpits, ferns, dogwood, and the ever-present poison ivy. In the middle of the open meadow between house and woods was a large island of weeds and brush too dense to penetrate: concealed within were woodchuck burrows, ancient stunted apple trees, some scrawny oaks, and a rotting wooden rowboat I discovered one day while looking for the cat. These talismen of my youth (especially the boat) were powerfully evocative and have the same effect in memory today, pulling me easily in weaker moments into a blind nostalgic swoon whose too-sweet pain obliterates all sense of self and centering.

Along the northern boundary though, a tangled mass of honeysuckle and multiflora covered the old fence, forming a tall thorny barrier that could have stopped a buffalo herd. And somewhere underneath the tangled shoots was a spooky wooden farm shed with a 1920s John Deere corn planter resting in the spider webs and shadows. When we first moved out to Still Pond Road, the shed was open to the meadow, but over the years the vines grew hungry, and it vanished back into the jungle. Just beyond the shed, where a path led through an opening to the woods, a large mound of rusty tin cans, broken bottles, and other detritus of an older way of life filled a little clearing next to scattered daffodils and paw-paws. Beside the flowers was a shallow gully that ran with water after storms — you would almost think it was a stream, except for the rolls of old wire fencing covered up with leaves, or the broken chunks of concrete substituting for expected rocks.

The old family dump was too much to clean up in an afternoon or day, too perilous with sharp-edged bits and poison ivy, and so it lay in peace for all the time we lived a mile and a half from the Chesapeake Bay. I forgot about it when I wasn’t back there, moving gingerly along the margin of the multiflora. But every time it poked me in the eye, I felt a little sad and dirty, like wearing someone else’s discarded clothes. Previous owners had used the greenest, most isolated corner of the property to throw the trash they couldn’t burn, and the sense of violation never really went away, not even when spring was bursting out in all its glory and the woods were full of birds. That portion of the property was like a story no one told, the same way the discovery of an Indian chief’s burial site appeared one week in the local paper and then sank out of time.

The wild places of the Shore were glorious, of course, if largely fenced away. The best way to view the most pristine areas behind the gates of large estates was from wide tidal rivers or the Bay. The water was a democracy of open space if one knew just where to go, and I sailed, motored, and paddled wherever I could. To do this required hauling boat and trailer to a landing, often in climate conditions that would suit an Aussie crocodile, which made the thought of owning waterfront a pragmatic goal for anyone who liked to roam. The odd thing was that even on weekends, I hardly ever saw a dock or boat in actual use. There were others on the water, but rarely from the places where tarpaulined sailboats lay rocking in the swells with rigging dinging quietly against the masts.

One day I met the mailman at our box across the road. One of the best things about living where we did was how most people knew each other at least a little, giving the community a sense of who they were. The rural carrier, a life-long local fellow, did lighting for the community theater group; his aging mother ran an impossibly barren “store” for the mostly segregated crossroads village a few miles away. I stood there chatting by the open window of his car when the conversation shifted to outings on the river. Like all true Eastern shoremen, he knew his way around a trotline and viewed crabbing as an inherent right. We shared the feeling of independence fostered by a one-man boat, a bonding common to many who spent personal time on the river. But then the penny dropped:

“Guys like you and me,” he stated with conviction, shaking his head, “will never have a place on the water.”

That was it, a supposed law of nature, internalized and true forever more. The sun came up, the sun went down, and guys like him knew not to question. Don’t put me in that box, I thought silently, as I waved him on his way. Crabs are bottom feeders, of course, and the somewhat sullen stance I always felt beneath the smiles of so many Delmarva peninsula dwellers is clearer to me now.

* * *

In the heat of summer, the sky turns white with haze over the Eastern Shore, just like it did when we visited my grandparents in the early ’50s before air conditioning and TV. There was a giant fan on a pedestal, the kind you used to see in railroad stations and department stores back then. It stood in a corner of the living room and roared steadily all day long as I sat on the hot, dusty carpet and tried to read my comic books, the wind it blew like warm water in my face. Outside the air was just as hot and humid, only nothing moved. I remember the slow, scraping squeak the screen door spring would make when my aunt and uncle came by to visit, no one moving very fast. Someone would lie and say the fan sure felt good, and then we’d all sit quietly until my aunt got up to get herself a glass of ice water from the kitchen. If there was an Orioles game in Baltimore, Granny would switch off the fan and turn on the radio. We’d listen to the crack of the bat and tinny cheers from the cauldron of Memorial Stadium for a while, then give up and start the fan again. (Decades later it was just the same, except for fewer of us in the room… )

Nowadays it seems most people have AC and shut the world away. What a friend now living in Virginia called “that accursed spirit during the summer that would hang in the haze that settled over the corn” is easier to ignore but still in place, melting memories of warriors and grown men’s dreams. Meanwhile, our friend the mailman probably inherited his mother’s store, retirees from the city buy vegetables at farmers’ markets and talk of country life, and when the vice-president who shot an old man in the face is at the manor in St. Michael’s, the Secret Service pulls boaters over on the Miles. (Not “guys like you and me,” of course, because they aren’t even there.) It all works so easily, like falling through a trap door in the dark.

I miss the water, sure, but not the undertow.