On the dock, I couldn’t pick up the vapors of Baltimore that I remembered from earlier years, the drift from factories making soap, sugar, and spices (including the spice without which Chesapeake cuisine would literally pale — the rusty grains of Old Bay Seasoning). Instead I smelled the old bay itself into which we soon headed, briefly accompanied by a school of small fish, down the Patapsco River lined with wharves and warehouses and behind them enough pointed steeples and spires near Fell’s Point to make it appear bristled. Baltimore — the third-busiest port on the East Coast — is about fifteen miles from the open water of Chesapeake Bay and almost two-hundred sailing miles by the southern route from the Atlantic.
We passed the anchorage from which Francis Scott Key got an early-morning view of the immense flag that was still flying at Fort McHenry following a night of British bombardment. Some years before, I was inside the fortification one evening when, helping five others to fold the huge replica flag, I got a true notion of its size (no wonder Key could see it); a view from his anchorage would have revealed more banner than bastion visible, and that raised a question with Q: “Wouldn’t a spangled flag that big help an enemy direct bombs bursting in air?”
The Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, in its most limited definition, begins 180 miles due south of that banner, virtually at the mouth of the Chesapeake. Our voyage was to be a sailing through backwaters and into waterside villages — some reachable only by boat — all the way paying little attention to the few cities along the route. In my mind I wanted to hear the electronic voice of one of those automobile satellite-navigation systems cautioning: “You are entering an unverified area.”
The prefix intra is crucial to the history of this interior passage because the Waterway came about as protection from seas dangerous with storms and, during several wars, British privateers and German U-boats. Following Gallatin’s formal proposal, construction of a route within the coastline — behind the peninsulas and outer islands — took more than a century. The Inland Waterway System, of which the AICW is a portion, offers almost four-thousand miles of sheltered passage from Boston to Brownsville, Texas, only a few of those miles open to the sea. At the time of our voyage though, survival of the Waterway was not assured, in part because of enormous expenditures for a war in the Middle East. I’d been aboard just a couple of hours when I heard that funding for the Army Corps of Engineers to maintain the route was insufficient, despite urgings from the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway Association. Should you, peripatetic reader, enjoy sailing inland waters, wait no longer to travel this passage unless you are a long-distance canoeist.
I’d have preferred following the route in my own small boat on my own schedule, one accommodating quixotic quests and overnight anchorages in the creeks and guts and gunkholes where I could snub a cockleboat to a tree to await the clapping of a Virginia rail or hear against the hull the clicks of snapping shrimp, or catch a glimpse of a little mouse-sized native, its name longer than its tail: the Southern marsh rice-rat. After several years of hoping, I decided such an independent expedition was unlikely and settled for travel on a small motor-vessel with a name so chauvinistically vainglorious I won’t mention it. But, unlike my imaginary skiff, the real boat rose high enough above the water to give good viewing over bankside trees into territory otherwise veiled from a smaller craft. Our tub had its advantages, some of which came from a few fellow travelers who had knowledge to share. In my notes I rechristened her the Bog Trotter, an old name for that peculiar bird of wetlands, the American bittern, about which I’ll say more when a moment of quiet in the voyage arrives.
It was past midday by the time we reached the open water of Chesapeake, and the early November sunset further shortened visibility so that we would sail half the bay at night, a loss acceptable only because it wasn’t the Chesapeake we’d come for. After dark, trying to keep the estuary before me, I pulled from my satchel of books about territory along the Waterway William B. Cronin’s The Disappearing Islands of the Chesapeake. Disappearance and vanishings are a significant aspect of the ICW because the Atlantic has moved its shores eastward and westward, back and forth, for millions of years, perpetually shifting the sea-edge across hundreds of miles. Greenville, North Carolina, to pick a place, today about seventy-five miles from the ocean, would have been a coastal town forty-five million years ago; Atlantic City, to choose another, only eleven-thousand years ago would have been more than a hundred miles from the beach. Even now, longtime residents along the southern shores have numerous here-today, gone-tomorrow stories, and the engineering effort to keep the Intracoastal open is an unceasing battle to deny the Atlantic its ancient grounds and defy its nature. Perhaps more than any other thousand miles in America, this southeastern coast and its attendant islands are continually being remade at a rate humans refuse either to conceive or concede.
Cronin says that some five-hundred islands have slipped beneath Chesapeake waves in historical times, implying a pattern that not merely augurs the future but guarantees it. While most of the now vanished lands — once the Indians were pushed off — were without later residents, a few currently inhabited islands, such as well-known Tangier and Smith, are today effectively dissolving. In the last century and a half, Tangier has lost an average of almost nine acres each year, and Smith has had to be, quite literally, shored up with dredge spoil, a “solution” (so say I, not Cronin) that will last only somewhat longer than a cake of ice in Lexington Market.
The great engine — in addition to shifting tectonic plates — behind this change is climate. Polar ice-caps melt or enlarge, and the consequent heat-exchanges create storms that cause submergences and risings, erosions and depositions, a metaphor, if you will, for the engines that drive our lives: our past submerging, our memories eroding here, perhaps depositing something over there.
A hat on the head of a five-year-old child standing at the edge of the shoreline at low tide on Smith Island is equal to its highest point, scarcely enough elevation to accommodate erosion or a storm surge in a bay rising two inches every decade. Given the transience in so many aspects of American life — jobs, marriages, housing, first place in the National League — we should do better in at least acknowledging temporariness other than by disbelief, surprise, or irritation; of all nations, we should grasp ceaseless comings and goings.
So, with those ideas, Q and I descended the temporarily present eastern edge of the American continent, an intricate terrene-marine realm.
3
Where the Turkey Buzzard Won’t Fly
BY DAWN THE Bog Trotter had left the Chesapeake and crossed Hampton Roads — the historic waters of the battle between the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (built as the USS Merrimack), where neither vessel could do in the other but did do in the era of wooden warships. We tied to the wharf in the “refurbished” Town Point section of Norfolk, Virginia, just long enough to allow a walk through the rebuilt heart of the city, now tidy and clean but purged of much history, including the barnacle-back haunts I remember from my naval days there in the early ’60s. I don’t want to argue for the preservation of dives and boozers and juke-joints, flophouses and fleshpots. Nevertheless, isn’t there a middle ground between those places and vapid, disinfected high-rises or the new massive mall that not only obliterated history but seemed to drive out humanity after five p.m.? Was this Norfolk, Norwalk, or Norwich?
For us just then, it mattered not, because our boat was again soon under way toward the promise of unverified areas lying in a slender strip of creeks and cuts and canals and channels, islands and islets, shoals and sounds, the corridor of the magenta sailing-line, places where dwelt wood storks and manatees, and fish that drum, shrimp that snap, birds that clap, and not a few chefs who cook up Low Country cuisine of utterly silent oysters living in a cavalcade of waters once coursed by Indian dugouts long before Britons began cutting sarsens for Stonehenge.
Our tacks during the next two weeks would be alternations from due south to southeast to southwest, to get us not only n
ine-hundred miles south but more than two-hundred miles westward, directly below not Baltimore but almost due south of Cleveland. At the mouth of the Elizabeth River, between Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, floats a buoy called Mile Marker Zero. The Intracoastal Waterway begins there, not far from the encounter between the Monitor and Merrimack and in the shadow of some of the facilities for the largest naval-base in the world.
How is it we are to know our pasts? One approach is to stand where significant pieces of it unfolded, and there to imagine the place as it was then, its colors, weather, sounds; at Mile Zero, to hear the Dahlgren guns of the Monitor and smell the burnt powder from the Merrimack is to become a kind of witness to a battle that saw no winner except warfare itself. Giving our recall of history a physical setting — its own actual stage — improves memory and deepens travel and provides one more reason to rise and go forth. (Incidentally, the guns and history-changing turret of the Monitor recently had been brought up from the Atlantic and were on display — temporarily in a tank of water — just a few miles from Hampton Roads, and that makes imaginative re-creation easier: you can at last see big pieces of that infernally fascinating engine of war.)
The lower Elizabeth River was a corridor of naval ships large enough to hoist aboard the Monitor and Merrimack as if they were dinghies. The riverbanks, initially lined with piers and naval cranes, gradually changed to industrial wharves and fuel tanks and piles of construction materials, then changed again to a wooded shore on the west, the east side splattered with rusting hulls, an abandoned tug in collapse, a few moored small boats. Several of the bridges raised for us, revealing waiting autos with drivers whose faces wore not curiosity but annoyance, thereby disproving my notion that to see a moving boat, any moving boat, was of necessity to wonder where it might be going and wish to be aboard. Are there truly souls so numbed by contemporary life that a passing vessel with waving hands will fail to rouse an entrapped motorist?
South of Norfolk, two water routes, both canals, run along the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp; the one we didn’t take cuts a generally straight southerly course while the other — somewhat newer, wider, and deeper — heads east before turning south. They rejoin below Elizabeth City, North Carolina.
I was hoping we’d follow the older Dismal Swamp Canal because its narrower channel gets a boat closer to shore and wildlife. Q had told our captain, “He’s an old sailor-boy who likes to get on water so he can see the land,” and the captain said, “So do I.” He, nevertheless, chose the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal of 1859 that sees some fifteen-thousand boats annually, most passing through the only lock on the main line of the ICW and moving on along what’s left of the eastern side of the Dismal Swamp where draining for a naval airfield and pockets of suburban sprawl had been significant, although a deep fringe of canal-side trees created an illusion of sailing through a less overrun wetland. Both canals allowed quick exodus from an urban world to a wooded one, the A&C merging with the North Landing River flowing into Albemarle Sound at the North Carolina line.
Years ago, after hearing for the thousandth time that “there are two kinds of people in this world,” I started a list for a short story (never written) about the follies of a man who sees only two sides of existence, a limitation that makes him judgmental beyond his capacities to judge wisely, his dichotomizing turning things into opposites rather than revealing them as strands in a complex web beyond full comprehension. My list wasn’t a high-toned thing of good versus evil or magnificent against miserly; it was of a much lower order, duos like Anglophiles versus Francophiles. Lovers of dry barbecue or wet. Fountain penners versus ballpointers. Sinkers or swimmers. List makers versus the sane.
Here’s one I might have included: inland boaters or blue-water sailors. My days with the Navy gave me a lifetime fill of an unbroken ocean-horizon forever beyond, so that in 1964 when I left my ship as a seaman, I became a mere boatman who prefers voyages with visible bounds, trips that carry a traveler into a landscape; the narrower the water and smaller the boat, the better for my passage. That, as you can see, means my environmental ethics sometimes bump into my love of canals, since the two don’t always harmoniously cohabit. The unnaturally uncurving banks of the Albemarle and Chesapeake, however, didn’t destroy the pleasure of gliding quietly along the swamp margin. To sit on the deck in the warm autumn sun and watch America slowly slip past, no semitrucks on your bumper, no weary motel clerk to deal with, no gas tanks to fill, was just plain damn sweet. And then, to be able to study a chart or a text while moving through a territory allows one to link symbol with its actuality, a significant boon to remembering a place.
The prospect of seeing the Great Dismal Swamp led me to carry William Byrd’s The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, his narrative of surveying the border in 1728 through the swamp and on westward to the shadow of the Great Smokies. My belief that human voices of the past are also characters in a landscape allowed me to keep traveling the Dismal even after sundown and made me eager for sunrise to see the reality of what I’d been reading about the night before. (You especially understand this last part, envisioning reader, because it’s what you’re doing at this very moment.)
William Byrd, born in 1674 in Virginia and educated as a barrister in England, returned to America to become a legislator, a naturalist, and a closeted man of letters. He was a cosmopolite in the brambles, he could turn a phrase, and he wasn’t overly decorous about describing earthy aspects of life in the colonies a half-century before the Revolution. His narrative is history one rarely encounters in school, as he answers questions anyone but the priggish can delight in. On that second evening I read about a place just seven miles east of where we were at that moment:
On the south shore not far from the inlet dwelt a marooner that modestly called himself a hermit, though he forfeited that name by suffering a wanton female to cohabit with him. His habitation was a bower covered with bark after the Indian fashion, which in that mild situation protected him pretty well from the weather. Like the ravens, he neither plowed nor sowed but subsisted chiefly upon oysters, which his handmaid made a shift to gather from the adjacent rocks. Sometimes, too, for change of diet, he sent her to drive up the neighbor’s cows, to moisten their mouths with a little milk. But as for raiment, he depended mostly upon his length of beard and she upon her length of hair, part of which she brought decently forward and the rest dangled behind quite down to her rump, like one of Herodotus’ East Indian Pygmies. Thus did these wretches live in a dirty state of nature and were mere Adamites, innocence only excepted.
It was Byrd who firmly affixed the adjective dismal to a swamp so challenging penetration by his surveying crew that he, a gentleman, circumvented most of it and concluded it was lifeless to the degree “not even a turkey buzzard will venture to fly over it.” Yet, thirty-five years later, George Washington, ever the land speculator, spoke of the Dismal as “a glorious paradise” that could be improved by draining. Whether such drainage might kill paradise didn’t cross his mind. Indeed, over the next few generations the greater part of the swamp was drained and logged until 1973 when a portion of what survived became a national wildlife refuge. Even still, continued ditching at its margins allowed agriculture and the sprawlation of Norfolk/Virginia Beach to continue consuming the Great Dismal until more than two-thirds of the swamp Byrd knew have vanished.
I will risk your patience with a further comment from Byrd suggesting one aspect of such terrestrial loss. About the extinct passenger pigeon, he writes:
The men’s mouths watered at the sight of a prodigious flight of wild pigeons, which flew high over our heads to the southward. The flocks of these birds of passage are so amazingly great sometimes that they darken the sky, nor is it uncommon for them to light in such numbers in the larger limbs of mulberry trees and oaks as to break them down. . . . In these long flights they are very lean and their flesh is far from being white or tender, though good enough upon a march, when hunger is the sauce and makes it g
o down better than truffles and morels would do.
Reading Byrd made me curious enough to leave my bunk and go out on deck and try to see by moonlight whether anything from his world was yet visible. At Troublesome Point we’d left the swamp behind, and I had to imagine rather than see, so I returned to the cabin and Byrd’s account of a place once not far from where we were at that moment. In describing his visit with his weary and deprived crew to a Nottoway settlement, he speaks frankly about practices usually ignored or hidden by other writers and implicitly reveals the important role of women in Indian-Caucasian relations not just there but across America:
Though their complexions be a little sad-colored, yet their shapes are very straight and well proportioned. Their faces are seldom handsome, yet they have an air of innocence and bashfulness that with a little less dirt would not fail to make them desirable. Such charms might have had their full effect upon men who had been so long deprived of female conversation but that the whole winter’s soil was so crusted on the skins of those dark angels that it required a very strong appetite to approach them. The bear’s oil with which they anoint their persons all over makes their skins soft and at the same time protects them from every species of vermin that use[d] to be troublesome to other uncleanly people. We were unluckily so many that they could not well make us the compliment of bedfellows according to the Indian rules of hospitality.