Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  “I’m Dr. Paul Adamson, here to warn you that you’re deluding yourselves if you think that reasoning or citing horrible examples will mend our defaced landscape. Seven states have conducted referenda within the past three years, and the voters have delivered a strong, clear message: ‘We like our clutter. We insist on the right to pitch our beer bottles wherever we damned well wish.’

  “It is counterproductive to argue that our citizens ought not to exhibit such destructive traits. Our problem is to uncover why they are so loyal to the empty beer can and why they insist upon using it to decorate our highways. Three disturbing factors operate. First, drinking from a can, whether it contains beer or soda pop, is a machismo thing, and in an age when we repress one machismo manifestation after another—old-style courtships, use of guns, certain speech patterns—young men are finding the beer can a last refuge. It is socially desirable to guzzle, and peer domination insists that when the can is emptied, it be thrown with arrogance wherever it will be most conspicuous.

  “Second, in a period when the government restricts our actions in scores of new ways, and when it yearly sends out intrusive tax forms which not one person can understand, it is inevitable that the vigorous person must find some way to express his resentment, and what better way than with an empty beer bottle?

  “Third, and this is much uglier than the first two reasons and also less susceptible to control, littering a lawn with empties is a form of social aggression used especially by those groups who feel they are disadvantaged by society. Do the responsible citizens of the community want to keep the ditches clear? The young rebel is opposed to everything the responsibles try to protect, and tossing empties into the very spots they cherish is satisfying revenge.

  “Thus we have three powerful reasons urging us to deface the land, and almost none driving us to protect it. Good friends, you and I are engaged in a losing battle.”

  Comments on this doleful litany were spirited. “Can’t we pass laws requiring deposits on cans and bottles?” Adamson replied that such plans had been rejected sharply by most voters on the grounds that they were an imposition on their freedom. “Can’t we appoint county officials with trucks to pick up the awful garbage?” Adamson pointed out eleven instances in which communities had rejected such proposals as unwarranted expense, the argument being that it penalized those who did not drink beer. “Can we simply outlaw the damned things as socially destructive? We’d outlaw a plague of locusts quick enough.” Adamson did not have to go far afield for his answer to this; he referred to the commission’s decision that since Norman Turlock had invested so much money in his canning plant, it would be unfair to him to change the rules now.

  “What can we do?” Ethel Steed asked in some desperation.

  “Nothing,” Adamson replied. “I’m head of the agency that’s supposed to prevent the plundering of Maryland’s natural beauty, and there’s not a damned thing I can do.” He paused to let this fact sink in, then added, “There is, however, one thing you might try.” Everyone leaned forward, for the desire to end this nuisance was vigorous. “Buy yourself a basket, and three days a week go out like me and pick the damned things up.”

  The meeting ended on such a hopeless note that the Steeds did not want to go home, and they were relieved when Chris Pflaum suggested that they wait in the lobby and join Dr. Adamson for lunch. They found him in a reflective mood, wanting to talk about the problems of the Chesapeake. “I was raised in Chestertown. Went to Washington College there. Didn’t learn much calculus but I sure learned how to man a schooner. I lived on the bay in the good years, 1936 to the beginning of 1942. No bridge crossing the bay. No oil deposits on your hull. Crabs everywhere. The best oysters in America. And what I remember most fondly, you could jump overboard at any spot in the bay and swim. No jellyfish. It was then that my intense love for the bay was born.”

  But he did not want to stress the old days at the expense of the present. “This is still the world’s most enchanting inland water. Chap in my office who loves to sail calculated that if a man owned a boat which drew less than four feet, he could cruise the Chesapeake for a thousand successive days, and drop anchor each night in a different cove.”

  “Sounds improbable,” Steed said.

  “Let’s take the Tred Avon,” Adamson suggested, and from memory he rattled off eighteen contributory creeks. “Now, let’s take just one of them, Plaindealing, and recall only the coves we can name. Twelve of them. You could spend six months on the Tred Avon and each night anchor in some cove of heavenly beauty. And remember, we have forty rivers as good as the Tred Avon. My friend was conservative. There must be eight thousand coves along this bay—all of them in peril.”

  He spoke of the dreadful burden humanity was throwing upon this inland sea: effluvia from the sewer systems, poisons from the plants, industrial waste from the entire Susquehanna Valley, the garbage of the small-boat fleet, the awful pressure of human beings, each year more insistent, less disciplined, more wasteful, less attentive.

  “Ecologists in Germany and Japan and Russia are working on the theory that it is man himself who is the contaminant. Not his manufacturing plants, nor his chemicals, nor his oil spills. They’re the conspicuous disasters, but the permanent one is the accumulation of men and women in great quantities and large clusters. Even if they do no single thing disastrous, it is they who create the great disaster. By their numbers alone shall ye know them.”

  He dilated on this for nearly half an hour, developing the theme first enunciated by German scholars analyzing India. “They found that numbers alone are determinant. Around the world, wherever six thousand people congregate they justify a city. Six thousand people merit having a shoemaker, and a barber, and a man who specializes in baking pastries, and a sewage engineer, however primitive. The outside specialist has no right to ask, ‘What is the justification for this city?’ It is its own justification.

  “Well, the same kind of limit probably operates negatively. If you have clustering on the shores of any body of water a large enough population, that water will be destroyed. You watch the Mediterranean two hundred years from now.”

  A woman at the lunch made the obvious remark that she wasn’t going to be on the Chesapeake two hundred years from now, and she doubted very much that any of the others would be there, either, to which Adamson replied, with no impatience, “The individual witness disappears, yes, but the collective intelligence persists. Two hundred years from now, in 2177, someone like me, with every one of my apprehensions, will be lunching in Patamoke and weighing the future of the Chesapeake. We have to ensure that the bay still exists for him to worry about.”

  “We were pessimistic over the possibility of controlling empty beer cans,” Steed said. “How about the bay itself?”

  “The numbers terrify me, Mr. Steed. All of Central Pennsylvania contaminates our bay. Baltimore, Washington, Roanoke. Millions upon millions of people, all throwing their problems into the bay. How can it possibly survive?”

  “We said that about the goose, forty years ago. Now look at the population.”

  “Yes!” Adamson cried, his eyes brightening with that enthusiasm he had acquired as a boy. “The hopeful factor is what we’ve discovered in various countries. Any body of water with a strong flow, no matter how contaminated, can flush itself out—renew itself completely—in three years. If it’s protected. If it’s allowed to regenerate in its own slow, sweet way.”

  “Even Lake Erie?” a woman asked.

  “Of course! Three years of total policing ... no new contamination coming in from Huron ... average rainfall. Even Lake Erie could cleanse itself. Now there would be some stubborn deposits on the bottom, but in time even they would be degraded and washed away. The Chesapeake Bay is like a beautiful woman. There’s no humiliation from which she cannot recover.”

  The room in which the ecologists were having their lunch overlooked the Choptank, and from this vantage point no one could have deduced that the river had altered much in the past
three hundred and seventy years of the white man’s occupancy: the width was the same; the color was still a chocolate-brown; the tides ebbed and flowed without creating much disturbance; and the geese were back. Land which had begun to perish under the weight of tomatoes was prospering when planted with corn—thousands upon thousands of acres—and out beyond Devon Island, what was left of it, the bay rested in the wintry sunlight.

  “It’s in dreadful shape now,” Adamson said. “I suppose you know we had to close down three more creeks. Oysters all contaminated. Hepatitis factories, our doctors call them. You eat a plate of six, you’re in bed for half a year. The bay’s become a cesspool—a dumping ground for Baltimore ... and the others. But it could be restored.”

  He rose and walked nervously about the room, looking now at the Choptank, now at the forests of loblolly on the far shore. “Our gamble has to be this. That at some point in the next two hundred years there will be a group of people like us able to convince society to give the bay three years of rest. It will revive. Oysters will be edible again. Fish will return. Grass will grow in the creeks and the ducks will be back, too. Millions of them.”

  He was so excited by the endless possibilities of rejuvenation that his mind raced on. “Of course, when the ducks return, the geese may leave. Then we’ll change again and they’ll come back. The entire bay can be revived, every one of its eight thousand coves ...” He hesitated. His face grew somber. “Unless, of course, we have so contaminated the oceans that they can no longer send fresh tides and fish into the bay.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Mankind was destined to live on the edge of perpetual disaster. We are mankind because we survive. We do it in a half-assed way, but we do it. I suppose before the year ends we’ll even see some blue heron wading back. Their struggle has lasted for eleven thousand years. Ours is just beginning.”

  Not only were Commissioner Adamson’s hesitant predictions depressing, but wherever the Steeds drove that afternoon they saw the necklace of empties littering the roadside to remind them that they were powerless to do anything about this relatively small contamination. Owen became so irritated that he could not sleep and thought of heading downstream to Peace Cliff to talk with Pusey Paxmore about the rise and fall of men’s fortunes, but he felt that this would be an imposition.

  Till well past midnight he listened to Beethoven’s later quartets, and before dawn left the house to watch the geese feeding in the creek. As soon as the sun was up, he telephoned Chris Pflaum on the Little Choptank to ask if he could drop by. “Nothing of importance. Yesterday depressed the hell out of me, and I thought you might like to run down to the old ferry at Whitehaven, see how they lived in the old days.” He was delighted when Pflaum said, “Great idea. I’d like to visit the marshes.”

  Without waking Ethel, he left the house, counted the empty cans on the quarter-mile stretch he used as his barometer, and crossed to the southern shore of the Choptank. He drove slowly westward, pausing to pay his respects at the house in which Governor Hicks had lived prior to the Civil War: Remarkable man. Slaveowner. Slave supporter to the death. Goes to Annapolis and by force of his courage alone holds Maryland in the Union. Dies in disgrace. Along the Choptank they spat on his grave. A lot like Pusey. He shook his head and muttered, “That poor son-of-a-bitch,” but whether he meant the governor who had left the Choptank to find disgrace in Annapolis or the Quaker who had found his in the White House he could not have said.

  Nor would he have admitted why he wanted to visit Chris Pflaum’s residence; true, the Steeds had had some vague association with the old Herman Cline plantation now occupied by Pflaum, but no one was proud of it. And some interesting new houses were being built along the Little Choptank, but they held no fascination for a man who already owned his family plantation.

  What Steed really wanted to see was how young Pflaum was living; he’d heard rumors and wished to satisfy himself as to their accuracy. He was rather relieved, therefore, to find that Chris was living alone in the rambling old house; his wife had left him—“Said she could stand either the mosquitoes or the loneliness, but not both.”

  “You getting a divorce?”

  “She is. Says she wants nothing from me. Ten years on the Little Choptank gave her memories enough for a lifetime.” The young naturalist spoke without rancor and suggested that Steed leave his Cadillac and travel in Pflaum’s pickup. “That’s the proper way to cross the ferry.”

  Each man was delighted with the trip south; it took them along the banks of those lesser rivers which wound through vast marshes where the true values of the Eastern Shore were being preserved. They drifted down to Deal Island and invited Captain Boggs for a drink. He showed them a shortcut to Whitehaven, where the ferry across the Wicomico could be reached.

  “This is unbelievable,” Steed said in spiritual relaxation as he slumped back to watch a rural scene which had changed little in two hundred years. “Only visible difference is those new chicken sheds producing birds for Frank Perdue.” On the incredibly ancient roads one expected to meet oxen dragging timbers for Her Majesty’s ships—Elizabeth I, that is—and at the end of the road, where it dipped toward a small, muddy river, the ferry waited. It was on the wrong side, of course, but by pulling a rope the signal was raised, a grumpy black man moved aboard his rickety craft, the sidewheels engaged a cable, and slowly the little ferry came to fetch the pickup.

  It was a crossing into another century; upstream stood the gaunt and rusting remnants of what had once been the proudest tomato cannery in the Steed chain; how many black men and women, recently in bondage, had toiled here in the 1870s; how many promising Steed lads had worked here to learn the business. The crossing required only a few minutes, but it was so restful, so far removed from the problems of today, that Steed was drawn back into the lost centuries when the Steeds governed, and he was tempted into a most baronial action.

  Grasping Chris by the arm, he said almost imploringly, “Don’t remarry until you meet my daughter.”

  “Sir?”

  “I mean it. Damnit all, Ethel and I have this enormous place. The Steeds have always had plantations like it. My son’s lost. Quite hopeless. But my daughter’s worth saving. Chris, don’t remarry till I get her home.”

  “Mr. Steed, I don’t even know her name.”

  “Son, we’re talking about the centuries, not a few lousy mixed-up years. Name’s Clara. Have you any idea what Pusey Paxmore’s gone through?”

  The conversation was drowned out by a truck that began blowing its horn, not on the bank to which the ferry was heading but from the one it had left. “Damn,” the black operator growled, “you’d think just once they could fit together.” He looked ominously at Steed as if he had been at fault, and in some confusion the trip across the Wicomico ended, with Owen Steed staring at the ruined cannery and Chris Pflaum sadly bewildered.

  “Let me put it simply,” Steed said as they headed back toward Herman Cline’s plantation. “My daughter Clara’s a little younger than you. For three years she’s been on one hell of a toboggan ...” He fumbled, then said, “You haven’t done so damned well yourself. But the point is, Chris, you see land the way I do. You’re authentic. I want you to marry Clara and take over our place when I die.”

  “Mr. Steed, one day in the jungles of Vietnam, I discovered what was significant in my life. Marshes. Living with nature. And if I wouldn’t give up marshes for Vera, whom I loved very much, I sure as hell won’t give them up for a girl I’ve never met ... and her fifty acres of mowed lawn.”

  “You don’t have to, damnit! You live in the marshes half the year, in a real house the other half.”

  Chris drew back from the wheel, a husky young fellow who had already made the big decisions of his life, and as he studied the oilman he saw him as properly dressed, neatly trimmed and without a basic commitment in his body. “You don’t understand, Mr. Steed. North of the Choptank is for millionaires; south is for men.”

  “That’s bloody arrogant.”

  “And true.
I need the earth. I love the older ways down here. When I’m working in the marshes along the Little Choptank my soul expands. If I lived in a manicured place like yours, I’d die.”

  He was stunned by Steed’s response. “Son, I want you to check with Washburn Turlock. Ask him about the time he showed me the Refuge from a boat. One minute he said, ‘It’s got about two hundred acres,’ and within five seconds I said, ‘I’ll buy it.’ I needed that land as much as you needed your marsh. Only difference between you and me is you’re more primitive. If you’re smart, you’ll be at Patamoke Airport when Clara flies home from Paris. I think she’s as hungry to get back to the land as either of us.”

  Turlocks survived because they adjusted to their environment. From the moment Amos discovered what those newfangled tape recorders could do, he was satisfied that his goose problems were solved.

  He had always been supreme with the goose call, luring birds when others failed, but even at his expert lips that stubby instrument was chancy, and on some days he accomplished nothing. So he drove across the bridge to De Soto Road in Baltimore, where radio shops proliferated, and there bought himself a pair of powerful loudspeakers and a rugged tape recorder built in Sweden.

  When he reached home Midge bellowed from the kitchen, “What in hell you gonna do with that crap?”

  His intention was to record the calls of female geese as they came in heat, then to broadcast the calls to hordes of males as they flew overhead. “We master this machine, Rafe, we’ll have enough geese to stock every Turlock kitchen along the Choptank.”

  He mastered it so well that hunters from distant counties assembled to observe his miracle. As. the wildlife reporter for the Baltimore Sun explained: “Forty minutes before sunrise Amos Turlock and his men move quietly to their blinds and hide themselves beneath pine branches. As dawn approaches and the big geese begin to fly, Amos turns on his Tandberg and through the sky float the sounds of a female goose signaling to the gentlemen aloft. The males, delighted to hear the mating call, wheel in the air and descend swiftly into the muzzles of the Turlock guns.”