The 21st day of the 7th month of the year of the Camellia

FINDING THE MAJESTIC

One of the easiest things to do is to get in the car and go somewhere to find Majestic.
 

 I don't care how you define Majestic, but Webster says that it is something that is stately or grand.

OK, I'll go along with that but might add that it is something that you see just after dawn that takes your breath away and you remember for some fifty years or something like that.

Alright, we have all seen these guys in parks and playlands.  But this one is wild.

  Wild!

Sometime not so long ago someone brought a few of these Mute swans to the Chesapeake bay and they took hold.  However,  they do destroy the habitat.   They eat all the grasses, including the roots, in the bay.  And then they hit the winter wheat in the fields.  The problem is, they pull the whole plant out and of course it cannot grow back.

Still when seen in the early morning light and you are alone with them.....well, they are something else!

This stunning cignet was found on Assataeague Island in Virginia.

They like the Chesapeake and have multiplied freely!

Here on Hooper Island

Mute Swans on the Chesapeake can be found most places on the Eastern Shore as Eastern.  Primary places to search are Eastern Neck Island, the Choptank River, and Hooper Island.  It is worth the trip to go and seek them out.

It's amazing that such a large bird is so graceful in the air.  You can even hear their wings whistle as they fly overhead.

Another Chesapeake memory!

THE 29th DAY OF THE 7th MONTH OF THE YEAR OF THE CAMELLIA

ONE OF THE FIRST OF THE "FLIPPERS"

Some time in late 1953 a family of four ventured from the suburban wilds of Westfield, NJ to spend a weekend adventuring in one of the most unlikely of all places.

Back then roads were beginning to improve to the point that automotive travel not only  began to become in vogue but actually practical.  The New Jersey Turnpike was in place.  The Delaware Memorial Bridge was something at which kids stood in awe.  State Route 13 in Delaware was mostly four lanes south, and Maryland roads seemed cleanest in the nation.

Destination Rock Hall, Maryland!

Population at that time around 2,400.

  Population today around 2,400!

  The reasoning on my father's part was simple.  He was doing what I do whenever I write some article like this.

  He was going back!

After college sometime around 1932 my dad had gone to work for a dairy cooperative and his territory was the eastern shore of Maryland.  He was bringing his family back to discover that which he had some 22 years prior.  By this time he was successful in New York City and we lived in a bedroom city of commuters.  He wanted his kids to see what "Real" life was.  I will be eternally grateful because it started me on an odyssey that has lasted all these years.

By the time the weekend was over, he had bought his first house in Maryland!

You went down Rt. 20 from Chestertown to Rock Hall, passed Remington Farms, and through the only flashing light in town.  One had to be careful for two reasons.  Town income was dependent upon foreigners driving down on week ends and traffic tickets seemed the easiest way to get the income going.  The cops normally hung out at the old dump on Rt. 20 which is now part of a huge marina.  The other reason was the local dogs seemed to find the middle of the road very warm to old bones and they tended to nap there.  You just drove around them!

State Rt. 20 ends abruptly at Gratitude.  So abruptly that a few of the locals fired up on joy juice on Friday or Saturday nights were known to miss the stop sign and end up literally in the bay.  If they had been sober enough to make a right turn, they would have been on Lawton Ave in Gratitude and that is where my father started to buy property.  At one point he owned three pieces of land and homes on the waterfront.  Total taxes were $900 a year for all three.  That is the only part of the "Real" life he introduced us to that is now just a fantasy.

The first place on Gratitude

This house was purchased first and sold in 1971.  It was owned by "Miss" Lotty Strong and was forever known as Miss Lotty's place.  We completely renovated the place and it had a beach lot across the street on entrance of Swan Creek into the bay.  The view from this place of two islands offshore that once comprised Swan Point, was the first photograph I ever sold.  A local magazine cover.

Because of the noise and rowdiness at the small hotel next door during the Goose hunting season, my father made the next purchase.  A place we never really lived in for any amount of time.  He figured the only way to control the noise was to buy the place.

It had 13 bedrooms.  My job that first summer there was to paint the interior. 

230 Gallons!

Ultimately we took the back section off this place and moved it across the road to the final waterfront place he owned.  This is the place where my kids grew up vacationing and you could not ask for anything more.  A long dock, a fast fishing boat, and a patio of brick which I laid along with my own grandfather.

 

This original property was known as the Jones property as was owned by a sea captain of the same name.  At least that was what was told to us kids, my sister and me.  The original house was four rooms on a line from the road out towards the bay.  When we bought it, the only sensible way to clean it was to make a donation to the Rock Hall Fire Department.  They came out with their engines and high pressure fire hoses.  Opened the front door and blew everything right out the back door.  It was then clean enough to renovate.  The large section to the right is part of the hotel across the road and the garage to the left.

Why I remember the fishing.  This was after the striper moratorium when the blue fish came into the bay in huge numbers.  We could have caught so many as to start our own fertilizer plant.

This is also the place where I first met some of my oldest and dearest friends Ethel and Jessee.  Of course they were much older than I at the time!

Some general scenes in and around Rock Hall harbor just to strengthen the memories.

Rock Hall is not only a sleepy old watermen's village, but now a bustling sailing mecca.

However, if you get up early enough and the fog is just right....you get the feeling of the old place.

I guess Dad really wasn't flipping houses.  We lived in them all.  And I know both my parents are watching over their great grand kids knowing that some of the wonders of the Eastern Shore will rub off on them as well. 

 Bless them both and I miss them.

The 28th day of the 7th month of the year of the Camellia

LAND OF PLEASANT LIVING

That's what was known as the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay back in the fifties.....fifties?  Yep, almost 60 years ago.  I write this more for my kids and....shhhhhhhh, Grand kids! And not my other three thousand readers!

  The area is probably still known by that today, but it was a special term. 

 The boat was an old Bateau (wooden row boat for those of you still in the government run grade schools).  They had what we called one lung engines in them.  Small air cooled engines which would run all day on a gallon of gas (the 37 cent per gallon type).  You needed about two feet of clothes line with a knot in the end to wrap around the flywheel of the engine.  One pull and the thing started and ran putt......putt.....putt.....putt! Literally that slow but all day long.  You also needed a tin coffee can flattened on one side to bail all the water in the boat either from rains or leaks.  Didn't matter how it got there--------it seemed there was always a lot of it.

 I think that I slept with that knife by my side just in case I caught an oyster catcher (Monk fish) and had to dispatch him before putting my fingers in it's mouth.  A terribly disgusting fish that fed on the bottom, bit hard on the bait, and because they could break an oyster shell with their mouth, bit fingers equally as hard. 

They were known locally as a trash fish you could not eat.  Of no commercial value, they were killed and thrown overboard to feed the crabs which did of course have great commercial value.

Fishing on the Bay in the mid fifties for a boy of 15 was like going to the Bahamas and searching for all the world class trophy game fish of the magazines.  "Field and Stream" and "Sports Afield" glistened with enough imagination for any young angler.  And we just knew we were in the midst of it on the Chesapeake.  There were even sharks caught in the pound nets hung by the Watermen.  To us this was the wild, wild, west and we treated it as such.

We caught a lot of white perch around the docks of the bay, in the tributaries, creeks and streams.  This seemed to me to be the staple fish when I first emerged from the front porch to explore the vastness of this, the worlds largest estuary.  A few yellow perch always added to the mix and there were always, always small pan stripers of about a foot long.

Financial sustenance for us young anglers necessarily included earning money from some source or other to support our finny ambitions.  Crabs were our money crop.  We could even catch a half dozen from each dock, simply by dipping them from the pilings with a long handled did net.  Didn't matter whose dock we walked out on, everyone knew what we were doing and did not seem to mind.  So one of us would carry a bushel basket and the rest with dip nets and we would go up and down the shore marauding everyone's dock.  Just marched out on them like we owned the place.  Nobody bothered.  Hell, nobody even locked their front doors at night.....ever!

When we needed money, we just headed for the shallows of the bay and netted a bushel of these blue crab critters.  Took them to the fish house and sold them for as little as $5 a bushel as I remember.  I hear the now go for around $200 plus retail.  One anchored the boat in the shallows and jumped into the water with a dip net.  We towed a bushel basket in an old inflated inner tube and put the crabs we caught in the basket.  You learned early on that the only place to hold a crab was the back fin in order to avoid being caught yourself.  They look small, but believe me they could bite and almost aways drew blood.  We walked slowly through the bay grasses to make the crabs swim out ahead and then tried to snatch them up with the net.  It was great sport and took some unknown technique passed down from the Native Americans.  (That's Indians for you sensitized politically correct government scholars) Often we would get doublers, or two crabs doing something together. 

 Most of the time one of them would be a much sought after soft crab.

 If we got really lucky we also caught a mess of the soft crabs which sold at a mighty premium.

There were (still are) such places as Love Point, Love Point Light, Hickory Thicket, Hodges Bar, Swan Point and Creek, Tavern Creek, Rock Hall, The Triple Bouys, Tolchester, Betterton, Chester River, the Bay Bridge, and Gratitude. 

 If we got low on gas we had to go to the marina at Gratitude or the commercial docks in Rock Hall.  Rock Hall was were the Watermen hung out, tied up their boats, met fishing parties, and sold their catch.  In the fifties there must have been as many as a hundred party boat captains who took the Philadelphia and New York green horns out striper fishing.  It was great sport and superb fishing, but as with everything else, it had it's place in time.  Eventually party boat fishing on the upper bay died due to lack of fish and a five year moratorium of striper fishing.  (Actually the moratorium was the best thing to happen to the fishery, but it took years to prove).

We took the money from our crab forays and went to local restaurants where they had pin ball machines that paid off.  We could take a five dollar bill and run up 300 games that paid off  $15, and our week was made.  In fact our little band of misfits wandered all around the area, bare foot, shirtless, with two fishing knives on our belts, and both pockets bulging with nickles won on the machines.  We could also throw those knives and stick them into trees almost every time......so we were armed.  Didn't do any good though, we never had to use them.  We just postured.  And that didn't do much good either, we were still just a bunch of kids living on and in the water.

Men were called Mr.-----(Insert first name here), and the women were Miss----(Insert first name here).  The neighbors down the street knew what you were doing all the time and told your parents before you could get home.  There was total respect for our elders.

  But you had to fight to become a regular in town.  Rock Hall, where I grew up in the summers, had the reputation that if the boys knew that Mohamed Ali was coming to town......they would fight just to see who would fight him.  All the time knowing they would lose to him.  A fishing boat captain told me that!  And I believe it.

  You see I hung out with a local guy who was about five foot two.  Sonny or Fess had this Napoleonic complex and everyone knew he was crazier than hell!  Tough as nails and would fight anyone at the drop of a hat.  Didn't matter if he was outweighed by 200 pounds.....he was respected because he was crazy.  Or at least all the town ruffians thought him to be crazy.....I just stood behind him.  After all my momma didn't raise any dummies that lived.

There was a time when I did have some of my New Jersey high school friends down after graduation.  We thought that we would go to visit some girls out to Piney Neck.  Now there was a certain competition between the Rock Hall boys and the Piney Neck boys.  Hell, there was a certain competition between the Rock Hall boys and ANY boys from out of town.  All I remember was that we had our fishing knives on our belts and looked very John Wayne-ish, but they had a gun or two.  One of us had to dive through the window of my moving station wagon as we were run out of town.  I think I got that old Pontiac up to 105 on the straight away outside of Piney Neck.  That was 1957 and I was just 17 with a new NJ drivers license.  The following two years, my parents would not allow me to go back to Maryland for the fear that I would get with the wrong people.  Actually one particular wrong female people.  But that's just another sordid story well left as is.

Stay tuned!

THE 27th DAY OF THE 7th MONTH OF THE YEAR OF THE CAMELLIA

ABOUT THIRTY DAYS

I checked once again the cam of the osprey chicks on the nest in Maryland.  Another thirty days and they will be in flight.  Amazing how quickly they grow and to think that by the middle of September, they must be ready for a southern migration which could take them as far as South America.  But I doubt in the first year, such a trip is to be expected.  Thanks go to the Atlantic Security Company in Chestertown, MD for putting this thing together.  Good people those!  Here is the link to the nest.

http://atlanticsecurityinc.com/video-large.htm

The youngsters are the ones with the white fringe to their black, back and wing feathers.  They are also noisy, learning how to scream constantly....perhaps mimicking their mother....or presumably for food as they are still too young to fly and catch their own fish.  Other than their talons, their eyes are an outstanding feature of this bird.  After all they have to be able to see a fish as small as three inches on or just below the water's surface from a hundred yards up, then track it all the way into their talons, and grab it for supper.  On the off chance, I saw Daddy bring TWO fish, one in each foot, to the young one night.  A rare occurrence I think.

Their time will now be spent strengthening their wings.  False flying as they flap around the nest but never becoming airborne.

Scream and flap.  Scream and flap.  Scream and flap!

Sounds like the behavior of certain of the human race. 

 But then most of them are adults.

Buy September they must be ready to leave.  You might, in subsequent years see one of them in the flat marshes around bays close to their birth. They could look to take up residence in the Chesapeake, Delaware, or Barnegat bays.

This bird was photographed in the flat country of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland. The preceding birds were on the Chester River which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay at Love Point.

I miss living on or around the Chesapeake.  A lot of the great charm of the Delmarva has been lost with the changing shape and condition of the bay.  But fifty years of memories for me have been made in that place.  I guess it just boils down to the fact that too many people want to live on or around the water.  I read somewhere that over 90% of the people in this country live within five miles of some body of water.  That just seems to me to be an extraordinary statistic, but they do pay college students to study such things, and upon which to write masters or doctorates.

I feel a period of old man day dreaming of the old times coming on.  Brace yourselves for the next few entries.  It could get rather maudlin!

THE 21ST DAY OF THE SEVENTH MONTH OF THE YEAR OF THE CAMELLIA

IS THIS LIGHTHOUSE HAUNTED?

I can't answer that question from a personal experience, but I did feel a little squirrely when I went inside.  And is that just a shadow in the second window to the right....................or?

This is the Point Lookout Lighthouse in southern Maryland.  It marks the spot where the Potomac River empties into the Chesapeake Bay.  It is within a state park which is very isolated with corn fields and pine woods dominating the landscape. 

Now you gotta figure that if 3,384 people died here.  Somebody is still running around in the ether.  Well, maybe.  I have heard of folks driving between cornfields and seeing figures in civil war garb walking with back packs and muskets across the road.

That's the lighthouse on the lower left facing the Potomac.  I copied this old print for a client who allowed me a copy.  It shows the layout of the old prison.  Lot'sa room for a soul to wander!

Some years ago, they repainted the old place which is enclosed and locked within a chain link fence.  The renovations were quite extensive and I made this image when they were still working on the improvements.  This is evidently the original color scheme of the place.

My first question to the park ranger when he took me inside was......

"OK, what's the truth? Is it really haunted"

  He kind gave me a crooked smile and said that he was fairly sure it was.  He said that at  the last "Ghost Walk" that they did for the public---(Evidently they found that ghosts are marketable)---He was in charge of crawling into a crawl space to throw the breaker switch on a series of lights.  Each time he did it, when he crawled out, the lights went off.  He watch them.  Crawled back in and turned them on again....out and out they went.  This he said, happened repeatedly with no real answer as to the cause.

Also,  they had ordered some lumber and paint from the local lumber yard for the renovations.  When the delivery truck arrived, the gate was open, and he drove into the yard in back of the light.  No one was there as he later told the story.  Getting out of the truck, one would normally would look out to the bay just to take in the scene.  As his gaze took in the bay, he distinctly felt a hand on his shoulder.  Of course there was no one there.  No goods were delivered that day.  The man got back into the truck, and in what I am sure was a pretty good state of fear, left the premises forthwith.

The ranger swore that these things really did happen.

Was he trying to sell me a bill of goods?

I still don't think that it's a shadow in that window!

THE FIFTEENTH DAY OF THE SEVENTH MONTH OF THE YEAR OF THE CAMELLIA

I was going through the files trying to find an image which would explain trying to jam 20 pounds of stuff in a 10 pound bag.

  Packing for this trip to North Wildwood.  Every time I do a show, I ask myself if it is worth it.  Well, I will see some good friends and hopefully make some sales.  And that should be fun!

But the point is I ran across this image, which I think, is just too good not to share.

It is of a Blue Heron on the Silver River in Florida. 

To begin with, the water is so clear that one can see bottom 20 feet down.  And the habitat is so wild that there are actually monkeys living wild in the woods.  Apparently, they escaped from a movie set some years ago. 

This blue heron is in the process of preening and just offered a classic pose with a wonderful background.

Cya all next Tuesday!

The 14th day of the 7th month of the year of the Camellia

ROAD TRIP!

Today packing and tomorrow I am a "Roady"  Headed to North Wildwood,NJ for a two day show.  An overnight stay Thursday in Middletown, DE with my Son and then on to South Jersey.

Hope to have some new stories and maybe some new photos to post here sometime around Tuesday.  In the meantime please read some of the back stories here as there will be a written test next week.  And not an open book one at that!

These are the scenes from the light tower at the Lighthouse.  Pretty cool place.

Hereford inlet is shown in the left photo and the continuation of the small lagoon and the ocean is to the right.

It just happened to be a stormy day and the rain to the left never got to us, but made a nice photograph

Cya next week!