“It’s hard to imagine.”
“Imagine what America would look like without the car, then you’ll know what this island would be like without the Belle. Now, of course, teenagers ride to high school in Crisfield on the bus boat. I’m not even sure we’re an island anymore, unless you spell it capital I-hyphen-l-a-n-d. Catch the difference?”
She looked down a narrow cove. “Land sakes! Tide’s coming in. Let’s hoof it back. I’ll be getting tired around the knees soon.”
The walk to Ewell was quieter and slower. Miz Alice asked how I came to be in Maryland. I told her and used Whitman’s phrase about “gathering the minds of men.”
She said, “When olden-day travelers went about, they might carry something called an Album Amicorum to gather the signatures and sentiments of learned men they visited along the way. Is that what you’re doing?”
“I’ve thought of the trek more as just the bear going over the mountain to see what he could see.”
At “Scud In” I stopped to get my duffel so I could catch the afternoon boat to Crisfield. “I have a question for you,” I said. “Tell me what’s the hardest thing about living on a small, marshy island in Chesapeake Bay.”
“I know that and it didn’t take sixty-three years to figure it out. Here it is, wrapped up like a parcel. Listen to my sentence. Having the gumption to live different and the sense to let everybody else live different. That’s the hardest thing, hands down.”
15
THE telescope house may not be indigenous to the Eastern Shore, but there were more of them here than anywhere else. The name derived from the linking of three houses, each successively larger, so that the two smallest ones look as if they could slide, telescope fashion, into the largest house. The design came about for economic reasons: a young family built a small two-room home; as the family and income grew, they added a “wing” of usually four rooms and later another addition of six rooms. Along the back roads north of Crisfield were many of them, most with standing-seam metal roofs.
On a peninsula between the Choptank and Tred Avon rivers, I came to Oxford, a seventeenth-century village of brick sidewalks and nineteenth-century houses. Only a few small streets branched off the main trunk, Robert Morris Street, a way of aesthetically cohesive homes and yards fenced by the Oxford picket—a slat with a design at the top that looks like an ace of clubs with a hole shot in it. The pickets were popular, even though painting the holes could take all spring.
At the bottom of Morris Street, across from the Tred Avon ferry slip, sat the Robert Morris Inn, the 1710 portion of which, built by a shipwright, was once the home of Robert Morris—Senior and Junior—a family of fortune and misfortune. The father died when wadding from a cannon fired in his honor struck him in the arm. The son, one of the wealthiest men in eighteenth-century America and a financier of the Revolution, was sentenced to three years in a Philadelphia debtor’s prison after a spell of reverses, one of which was the failure of the new government to repay his loan to the Continental Army.
Like some of the homes on Morris Street, the inn had fallen into disrepair by the 1940s after Oxford, a commercial port of entry the equal to Annapolis in the early years, lost its trade and, later, most of its fishing fleet. But, in the last decade or so, people from Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia began recognizing the calm and beauty of the little harbor town, and the new bay bridges across the Chesapeake near Annapolis made the Eastern Shore easily accessible. Newcomers moved in and started renovating the old homes. Now, in the boatyards rode motor-sailers and sloops and cabin cruisers; in the inn, mail-order-catalog yachtsmen and wives leafed through picture books of Eastern Shore hunting decoys and referred to the old houses as “architectural statements.” That was the new old Oxford. But between the inn and the harbor lay an old old Oxford: a tight cluster of worn houses of the blacks who had spent their lives here.
I took the Tred Avon ferry, at three centuries the oldest operating cable-free ferry in the United States, to Bellevue and drove out the double-fingered peninsula toward Tilghman Island. On the way was St. Michaels, “the town that fooled the British” by inventing the blackout. During the War of 1812, word reached the citizens that a night bombardment was imminent. Residents doused all lights except candles in second-story windows and lanterns they hung in treetops. British gunners misread the lights, miscalculated trajectories, and overshot the town. The trick preserved numerous colonial buildings, including one home where a stray cannonball fell through the roof and bounced down the stairway past the startled lady of the house.
By dusk, I was on Tilghman Island, an island only by virtue of a streamlet called Knapps Narrows. I parked near the wharf where much of the last sail-powered fishing fleet in America tied up. Against the clouding sky, I could make out the tall masts and long bowsprits of the skipjacks, ships that hoist twelve hundred feet of sail to pull port and starboard dredges over the oyster rocks. Some people believed the skipjacks were the last of an era while others held they were, once again, the future.
A storm came on, and I ran for Ghost Dancing. Inside, I listened to the rain beat out a hard, steely number on the roof; not yet ready for sleep, I lay on the bunk to watch the electric night.
Black Elk loved thunderstorms because in their “swift fire” he heard the Great Voices. For me, I heard more the Heyokas, those beings of lightning, those dancing human clowns who do things foolishly backwards. In his time on the blue road, the immaterialist Black Elk often heard voices from the clouds; in my season on the blue highways, the voices I heard were those of men—men who knew about stumbling not from observation as gods know it, but rather from having stumbled. For that reason, their words carried a force cloud voices could not match.
If clouds gave Black Elk his visions, they merely made me wet. But, like any man of ordinary cut, I sometimes heard human voices that showed the power not of visions but of revision, the power to see again and revise.
Lightning, flickering in the Ghost, flashed the rubbed image of the ancient stone face of redemption or death on the Minuteman’s marker into a spectral reflection. Whitman:
Can each see signs of the best by a look in the lookingglass?
Is there nothing greater or more?
Does all sit there with you?
Something opened. Call it the Lookingglass Syndrome.
Like a crazed enemy running amuck, ego, that excessive looking inward, had had its way in the Indian wars and now the old life with the Cherokee was lost. But what had not been lost was the chance, as Black Elk says, “to make over.” A man cannot remake ego because it is able to grow only in size like a simple cell. A locked form unable to change its structure, it is ever only what it is. Not so an angle of vision—as the old Jerseyman had called it—that a man could make over. To remake is his potential, his hope.
A human being is not a waxen rubbing, a lifeless imprint taken from some great stony face. Rather he is a Minuteman or a dog soldier at liberty to use the inclinations of the past as he sees fit. He is free to perceive the matrix, and, within his limits, change from it. By seeing both the futility in trying to relive the old life and the danger in trying to obliterate it, man can gain the capacity to make anew. His very form depends not on repetition but upon variation from old patterns. In response to stress, biological survival requires genetic change; it necessitates a turning away from doomed replication. And what of history? Was it different?
Etymology: educate, from the Latin educare, “lead out.”
Ten
Westward
1
NOBODY was sure about the figures around here. According to one waterman, of the hundreds of skipjacks once dredging oysters from Chesapeake Bay, about a dozen remained at Tilghman Island and perhaps an equal number at Deal Island; another man thought there might be as many as forty on the entire bay. Two men said skipjacks were doomed, but another held that expensive fuel would bring them back. He believed the old ships, with refinements, would become the new ships and that the diesel
boats replacing the skipjacks were the temporary ones.
Even though no new skipjacks had been built since 1956, the aging fleet still survived by virtue of a Maryland law, designed to prevent overharvesting, that allows dredging under motor power only on Mondays and Tuesdays. One other thing made for the survival of that single-masted, double-sailed boat of low and majestic lines. People here, now that the bugeyes are gone, consider the skipjack the very symbol of the Eastern Shore. It is to them what the beanpot is to a Bostonian.
I went north, crossed Chesapeake Bay, and stopped at the city market down among the eighteenth-century streets of Annapolis to eat a dozen fresh clams at Hannon’s stone counter; for the road I bought a cut of smoked chub, a quart of slaw, and six bottles of Black Horse Ale. I took Maryland 2 over the hills along the bay, turned west at Prince Frederick, crossed the wide Patuxent River, on through Burnt Store and Allen’s Fresh, across the even wider Potomac. I came into Virginia on state 218, an old route now almost forgotten. The towns, typically, were a general store and a few dispersed houses around a crossroads: Osso, Goby, Passapatanzy.
In Fredericksburg (home of George Washington’s brother-in-law, Colonel Fielding Lewis, a cannon manufacturer whom the Episcopalians buried in an honored position under the steps of Saint George’s Church—salve lucrum!), I stopped at a U-pump gas station—one of those places where you push your credit card through a slot to the on-duty commandant of the fuel islands. I asked for the air hose. “Ain’t got no air,” he said. I might as well have gone to a fireplug for service. The age of self-serve.
I suffered a reflex of nostalgia: back in the age of inner tubes, Vernon’s Service actually sold gasoline and service. Vern wore a little black plastic clip-on bowtie and stub-billed cap that gave him the look of a smudged motorcycle cop; with a faded red wiping rag hanging from his hip pocket, Vern over the years made an oily trail between the pumps and grease pit. He washed windshields with real sponges that he ran through a little wringer kept by the ethyl pump; I think his wife laundered them twice a week. But the men’s restroom wasn’t any cleaner than now, and there wasn’t a hot water faucet then either; but you didn’t need a key to get in, and his mother wouldn’t let him install quarter machines vending latex health aids.
There were only two posted rules at Vernon’s (one an old gas station apothegm): WE AIM TO PLEASE, YOU AIM TOO PLEASE. The other, NO TOOLS LOANED, was necessary because people liked Vern and actually asked to borrow his tools. Tools: Vern had no diagnostic equipment other than a good ear and eye, and he could correct a surprising assortment of problems with a screwdriver and adjustable wrench.
Even then, Vern was an anachronism. We boys who collected at his station didn’t call him that, of course. We called him, as I remember, “an old fart.” Vern, in his antique ways, believed that anyone who got behind a steering wheel could rightly be expected to operate the car rather than just steer it; that’s why you were issued an Operator’s Permit. He believed the more work a driver did, the less the car had to do; the less it had to do, the simpler and more reliable and cheaper to repair it would be. He cursed the increasing complexity of automobile mechanics. But, as I say, he was a man of the old ways. He even believed in narrow tires (cheaper and less friction), spoked wheels (less weight), and the streamlined “Airflow” designs of Chrysler Corporation cars of the mid-thirties—designs Chrysler almost immediately gave up on before proceeding to build the biggest finned hogs of all. We boys of the fifties loved their brontosaurean bulk.
Another of Vernon’s themes we laughed at was his advocacy of the comparable economy and safety of three-wheels (he drove a motorcycle with a sidecar) for city driving. He would say to us, “Two wheels ain’t enough, and four’s too many. So where does that leave you, boys?” “Three wheels!” we’d shout back, mocking him. “No sir, it leaves money in your jeans.”
So much for antiquity.
I went down to Civil War Spotsylvania for the night. The heavy fighting for control of the important crossroads in front of the Spotsylvania County Courthouse occurred in fields and woods a couple of miles away, and now the intersection linked the bluest of back roads, a crossing of so little economic, logistic, and strategic importance as to make the conflict between Lee and Grant appear imbecilic. The big battlefield outside town is today a national historic site marking the series of battles that began at a place called “the Wilderness.”
Atop one hill, with forest behind and open land in front, at a little bend in the breastworks, troops fought what may have been the longest and most savage hand-to-hand combat of the war: the Battle of Bloody Angle. The fighting here in the wet spring of 1864 was so close that cannoneers, standing ankle deep in mud, fired at point-blank range; soldiers, slogging it out in a smoky rainstorm, fought muzzle to muzzle, stabbing with bayonets, thrusting swords between logs of the parapet, clubbing each other into the mire from dawn to midnight, and trampling fallen men out of sight into the muck. The intense rifle fire cut in half oak trees two feet in diameter. One soldier, Horace Porter, wrote: “We had not only shot down an army, but also a forest.”
On that single day of May 12, nearly thirteen thousand men died fighting over one square mile of ground abandoned by both sides several days later. Yet, had anyone been paying attention, the battle could have shown the futility of trench warfare, a lesson that would have to be learned again at even higher cost in the First World War.
At that “bivouac of the dead,” as one monument had it, I ate the smoked chub. Across the grassy meadow stood a shaft commemorating the Ohio contingent; among the carved names: Gashem Arnold, Elam Dye, Lewis Wolf, Enos Swinehart.
Three children raced from under the oaks out over the grass to reenact the battle with guttural gunshots from their boyish throats. They argued briefly about who would be who: one chose the Americans, one the Germans, one the Irish. The small cries of the boys, and the bugs chirring out the last of spring, and the warmth of the evening sun almost turned Bloody Angle to an idyllic meadow. But its history was the difference. Even though Titans and Tridents and MX’s have not made “the red business,” as Whitman called it, a thing of the past, they have eliminated future battlefield parks where boys can play at war—unless scientists find means to hang monuments in the sky.
2
CAPTAIN Jack Jouett probably didn’t have a chance against the fame of Paul Revere, yet Jouett’s deed was comparable: on June 4, 1781, Captain Jack rode his bay mare, Sallie, forty miles from Cuckoo Tavern to Charlottesville to warn Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and that nest of sedition, the Virginia General Assembly, that Bloody Tarleton’s Green Dragons were coming. Jouett rode without stopping, while the British raiders stopped three times—once to burn a wagontrain—and thereby lost both the rebels’ capture and a chance at dramatic incident. A good thing for American history. And for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Jouett is a devilish name to rhyme.
When I saw Cuckoo, Virginia, it was a historical marker and a few houses at an intersection. I went up U.S. 33 until the rumple of hills became a long, bluish wall across the western sky. On the other side of Stanardsville in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I stopped in a glen and hiked along Swift Run, a fine rill of whirligigs and shiners, until I found a cool place for lunch. Summer was a few days away, but the heat wasn’t.
Water striders and riffle bugs cut angles and arcs on smooth backwaters of the stream that reflected cirrus clouds crossing the ridges. They would make West Virginia before I did. I was sitting at the bottom of the eastern side of the Appalachians; when I came out of the mountains again, I would be in the Middle West. Sixteen dollars in my pocket. The journey was ending.
In a season on the blue roads, what had I accomplished? I hadn’t sailed the Atlantic in a washtub, or crossed the Gobi by goat cart, or bicycled to Cape Horn. In my own country, I had gone out, had met, had shared. I had stood as witness.
I took a taste of Swift Run, went back to the highway, and followed it up Massanutten Mountain. Again the going was winding and slow. Nea
r sunset, I reached West Virginia and drove on to Franklin, a main-street hamlet sharing a valley with a small river as the Appalachian towns do. Above the South Fork, above a hayfield, and under the mountains, I pulled in for the night.
After a small meal in the Ghost, I marked on a map the wandering circle of my journey. From the heartland out and around. A blue circle gone beyond itself. “Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle,” Black Elk says. “Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.”
Then I saw a design. There on the map, crudely, was the labyrinth of migration the old Hopis once cut in their desert stone. For me, the migration had been to places and moments of glimpsed clarity. Splendid gifts all.
3
THE state seal of West Virginia is not a used tire hanging on a fencepost any more than the state flag is a tattered cloth used as an automobile gas tank cap. But well it could be. Heaped in yards, sliding down hills, hanging from trees and signs were old tires. It seemed as if West Virginia sat at the bottom of a mountain where Americans came annually to throw away their two hundred million used tires.
Along highway 33 lay hardscrabble farms, as the thirties called them, of rocky fields, dwindly crops, houses partly painted in two or three colors, trumpet vine crawling iron bedstead trellises, and jimson weed taking warped five-rail fences (kiss the middle rail to cure chapped lips). In the few places large and level enough for true fields, men were putting up hay by hand.