Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  And, of all things, soybeans helped preserve Greenwich. Because they can be planted, cultivated, and harvested by machine, soybeans have given value again to the area as cropland. For the vegetable growers, young members of the Seabrook family opened a new cannery near Bridgeton.

  “We’ve had time to organize and make changes because the demand for power in the seventies didn’t increase as much as A.C.E. predicted it would. Technical problems at the Salem nuclear plant gave us time too. Now, if you ask me, both regulations and time are on our side—on the side of history. It’s easier to keep a developer under a quiet but continuous pressure to act with corporate responsibility. But for us, it was an awakening at the brink.

  “The problem of what we’re doing lies in deciding what’s the benefit of history and what’s the burden. We’re not trying to hold back the future, but we do believe what has happened in Greenwich is at least as important as what could happen here. The future should grow from the past, not obliterate it.”

  When Roemer brought a second round of tonics, he said, “The evidence of history, whether it’s archives or architecture, is rare and worth preserving. It’s relevant, it’s useful. Here, it also happens to be beautiful. Maybe I’ve been influenced by the old Quakers who believed it was a moral question always to consider what you’re leaving behind. Why not? It’s not a bad measure of a man—what he leaves behind.”

  12

  JUDGE William Hancock, wealthy and influential, had no luck at all in his last year. In 1734 at Hancock’s Bridge, a few miles northwest of Greenwich, he built a grand house that he later had to flee from when militiamen took over south Jersey. On the night of March 20, 1778, as Tories regained the area, the Loyalist judge elected to slip back; he didn’t know that nearly a hundred revolutionists were bivouacked in his house. They captured him. Hancock probably would have been safe in the hands of his enemies had two hundred green-coated Loyalists not decided to retake the place that same night. They surprised the patriots in their sleep and bayoneted them even as the men begged for quarter. In the dark mayhem, Hancock’s confederates killed him too. The house still stands, a monument to the judge’s ill timing.

  Salem, a colonial town to the west, was abundant with old buildings and homes that would be museums most anywhere else in the country, but here they were just more declining houses, even though many stood when the men of Salem sent beef to Valley Forge to help save Washington’s troops from starvation. The town is the birthplace of Zadock Street, a restless fellow who left New Jersey in 1803 to make his way into the new western territory. As he went, he and his sons founded towns in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa, and named them all Salem; in Ohio, his Salem sprouted North Salem, West Salem, South Salem, Lower Salem, and Salem Center. Americans can be thankful that Zadock Street was not born in Freidberger or Quonochontaug.

  Under a milky industrial sky turning saffron in the afternoon sun, I crossed the Delaware River estuary south of Wilmington. The bridge was only twenty-four bird miles from Greenwich. A chance of history and geography had allowed the village to survive, but, with the spread of industry along the river, it seemed like a miracle.

  Delaware, the first state historically (the Delaware convention ratified the Constitution first) and the next to last in size, has only twelve miles of interstate, excluding the business routes of Wilmington. Thinking I had come to a land of blue highways, I turned onto Delaware 9 to follow the bay down the south shore. And I did find the route a pleasant unraveling of macadam through six-foot marsh grass and cultivated fields being pecked over by sea birds. There were few houses and fewer villages. Although I couldn’t see the bay, I could smell it and see evidence of it in an old steel lighthouse implausibly at the edge of a cornfield near Leipsic. But east of Dover, 9 came to an end. The Delaware blue roads run east and west, and the longitudinal highways are multilanes.

  I stopped at Dover for the night. I roamed around, trying for some conversation, but the evening turned blustery and people took to their houses and I to Ghost Dancing. From the rubbing, the two-hundred-year-old eyes of Lieutenant Mellen’s tombstone watched all. Whitman: “I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.”

  13

  ON the village green in Dover, citizens successfully buried the ghost of Chief Justice Sam Chew in broad daylight. Around 1745, the judge’s shade developed a nocturnal penchant for meditating on the common and beckoning to passersby. His honor’s whangdoodle began to keep the streets empty after dark and tavernkeepers complained. So residents dug a symbolic grave on the green, and, in full sunshine, tolled bells as clergymen spoke the restless soul to its peace.

  Out of Dover, I took the road toward Delaware Bay: out past the Delaware Fried Chicken stand, across the Muderkill River, and into Sussex County, an area once known to English settlers as the Whorekill, a name they took from the Dutch who called Lewes Creek the Hoerekill (“whore’s stream”) after Dutch sailors, one theory goes, consorted with Indian women there. Governmental officials now argue that the Dutch name was actually Hoornkill, after Hoorn, a village in Holland, but surely the American past isn’t always quite so proper as we hear it.

  South of Rehoboth Beach, I stopped to eat breakfast on the shore. Even though the sky was clear, the windy night still showed in the high surf. At my back rose two silo-like concrete observation towers, relics from the Second World War. At the top of each were narrow openings like sinister eyes. A battering of starlings flew in and out of the slits, the shrill bird cries resonating weirdly in the hollow stacks. The towers were historical curiosities, monuments to man’s worst war, one that never reached this beach; yet nothing identified them. To the young, they could be only mysteries. Had they come from the more remote and safer history of the Revolutionary or Civil wars, they would have been commemorated. Just when is history anyway?

  I walked along the estuary. A horseshoe crab the diameter of a basketball lay at surf’s edge. In spring the crabs, seemingly awakened from some lost Devonian deep, come up to the shallows of Delaware Bay to reproduce. The horseshoe crab does not look much like either a horseshoe or a crab, neither of which it is; its other common name, king crab, is also misleading. While the Alaskan king crab (truly a crab) is one of the culinary gifts of the sea, this Atlantic creature, this hoof of an arthropod, no longer even feeds chickens. But a generation ago, barefoot boys waded the bay and felt with their feet for horseshoe crabs and tried to stay clear of the lash of the spiky telsons, with which Indians once tipped fish spears; Delaware crabbers broke up the animals for chicken and pig feed, or they dried them in the sun for grinding into fertilizer. Today, horseshoe crabs again breed unmolested except for the old enemies of the sea bottom.

  I drove on south. Near Ocean City, Maryland, the shore became a six-lane strip of motels and condominiums tied together by powerlines. The playground of Baltimore and Washington. Hoping to find the backwaters again, I turned toward the lower end of the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay and came to Crisfield, “the crab capital of the world,” where Main Street was wide because the railroad to the piers used to run down it. At its end, at the pier, near where fishermen once loaded bay oysters and crabs on trains, I found the Captain’s Galley, a place of piled and bleached oyster shells.

  In the small bar, a sign opposite the Hav-A-Hank and Ajax Unbreakable Comb boards announced the next meeting of the Maryland Oysterman’s Association at the firehall. The watermen, as they call themselves, sat over beer and told stories in a quick speech that was part Southern and part Cockney London. All their long i sounds came out as “oy,” but oyster came out as “arster.”

  A man with white curls like combers said, “Tommy, oy heard on the CB you hung up the phone on your mother-in-law.”

  “Oy did not,” Tommy said. “You crazy? She’s not danglin’ a fuse at neither end for no reason. Besoydes, oy think too much of the gal to hang up on her. All oy did was pull the phone out of the wall.”

  An oysterman, whose crusty hands looked like the bottomside of a boat too long in t
he water, told about delivering blocks of ice in a dump truck on a scorching July day years ago: “We had a toyre blow. Toyme we got it fixed, the oyce had melted royght down. So oy says, ‘Ain’t but one thing to do now, boys. Let’s go swimmin’.’ Oy did the backstroke in the dump truck, and Tommy found an arster on the bottom and ate him.”

  “Man in for lunch the other day,” a waterman said. “He wasn’t no Amurcan, so he asks me—think he was a Dutchman—he asks me, ‘An arster, sir, now what is that?’ ‘An arster,’ oy answers him, ‘an arster’s between a fish and a muskrat. That’s what your arster is.’”

  Someone started a round of stories about a fellow called Weed whose insobriety and slow wit were legend. The one with the curls said, “Oy saw him last week roydin’ his boyk down the hoyghway, troyin’ to carry a forty-foot extension ladder, but he kept tippin’ over.”

  “That’s nothin’ new.”

  “Yes it is. He didn’t have the ladder closed up. Says oy to him, ‘Weed, better put a red flag on that ladder.’ Says he to me, ‘Don’t matter, Frank. She’s on the ground most of the toyme.’”

  I bought lunch in the next room, where light from the bay wavered on the walls. Softshell crabs were in season, and I did in four of them. The waitress, Diane Hinman, said, “Some think it’s like eating spiders.”

  “Good. Keeps the competition down. Where do your crabs come from?”

  She pointed out the window. “There.”

  The dock for the passenger boats to the islands was next to the Galley, so I asked her about the schedules. “Going to Tangier or Smith?” she said.

  “Tangier, I guess. I’ve never heard of Smith.”

  “Everybody goes to Tangier. Why don’t you go out to Smith Island? You could visit my aunt in Ewell. She’s lived there since before they had electricity. She burned oil lamps in her house until a few years ago. ‘Miz Alice,’ they call her. But there aren’t any hotels. You’d have to overnight in somebody’s home.”

  She called and made arrangements. I got my duffel from the truck and went back to the pier to wait. A boxy man said, “Is it to Smith or Tangier?”

  “Smith.”

  “Ah. The Methodist island. Different world out there. Ninety-eight percent of them earn a living off the water. Water, water, water. They follow the water. Marine biologists without degrees to the last man.” He came up close. “Think I’m going to tell you something. You mayn’t be returning.”

  “Why not?”

  “The food.”

  “Is it spoiled?”

  “Spoiled? That’ll be you. They cook like every day’s Thanksgiving.”

  The man was Bob Goldsmith, a contractor in Crisfield. He asked, “Have you seen the sights of Crisfield yet?”

  “What should I see?”

  “Get in,” he said.

  “But my boat.”

  “Not for an hour yet.” He bounced us down Main in his pickup. “Train used to come in three times a day to haul out the catch—crabs and arsters. Forty-six shucking houses then, and forty are gone. The tracks are three feet under the tar. Our catch used to be so big, they built this whole end of town on arster shells. Stick a shovel in and see for yourself.”

  “Tell me something I’ve always wondered. Why hasn’t the bay filled up with shells?”

  “Can’t say. Truth is, problem’s the other way round. Not enough shells in the bay, so now the state dumps half the opened shells back in the shallows so the spat got beds to fasten onto.” He turned off Main and slowed. “Would you like to die rich?”

  “With a choice, I’d rather live rich.”

  “Here’s how then. Invent a machine to shuck arsters and shell crabs.” He pulled up and pointed. “There’s the sight of sights in Crisfield.”

  “Where?”

  “Right there. The pyramid. An exact scale model of the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Cairo, Egypt. Orientated exactly the same. On the twenty-first of December, the tip of the shadow falls at the same compass point just like in Egypt—except for a small difference caused by latitude.”

  The Great Pyramid of Crisfield was six feet three inches high—not as tall as an NBA guard. Goldsmith and his sons had designed and built the poured concrete monument to commemorate the national bicentennial; inside they had placed photographs, Nanticoke arrowheads, phonograph records, and other items.

  “When they open it in twenty seventy-six, it just might contain the last ’forty-seven Mercury outboard motor on earth.”

  “I’d think a big concrete oystershell would make an appropriate time capsule here,” I said. “Hollow inside and the way they clamp shut so tight.”

  Goldsmith was floored. “A reglar arster’s ugly, but a six-foot arster?”

  We drove back to the pier. He motioned toward Janes Island, a piece of marsh grass rising just a little above high tide. “I’ve found over five thousand arrowheads and spear points out there,” he said. “That’s almost more rock than there is island. Nanticokes used to hunt it, but they lived on the mainland. The islands take a beating. Janes doesn’t look like much, but that little ground fed a lot of Indians for a couple thousand years.”

  The Smith Island boat, the Captain Jason, had tied up. Aboard were the two crewmen, three women, and a sack of groceries ordered by an islander. Clarence Tyler was at the helm, and Glenn Marshall, wearing a hat that said CAPTAIN, stood beside him. He had studied computer programming in St. Louis, before deciding what he really wanted was a working boat on Chesapeake Bay. He returned, found a partner in Tyler, and the two men bought the boat in 1977. They had made the twice-daily, eleven-mile run across Tangier Sound every day of the year since, except the month the bay froze over; then ice had piled up forty feet high, and people drove cars on the sound.

  “A good job this one is,” he said. “It’s no bosses on the water, excepting one—weather. No bosses is better than money.”

  After fifty minutes, we headed up an inlet with two marshy islands on each side and pulled in to the pier at Ewell, the main village of Smith Island; the boat would remain overnight at Tylerton on the southern end of the cluster of islands that comprise Smith. Marshall gave directions to Miz Alice’s. “Look for a little skipjack on the weathervane. ‘Scud In,’ her place is.”

  I put my duffel over my shoulder and took off down the dirt lanes, under the steeple, toward the west side of the village, to “Scud In,” a three-story red-shingled house overlooking an intricate network of coves and guts in a marsh that stretched so far I couldn’t see the bay. Scrawled on the front door was BACK DOOR! That’s where I went.

  14

  ALICE Venable Middleton was one of those octogenarians who make age look like something you don’t want to miss. She stood in her kitchen and watched through the window as I stepped around her garden of kale, collard, and corn.

  “Come in and close the door on that wind. I’m Alice. You’re here about our place. Well, Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. And so is Smith Island. We really should say ‘islands.’ How’s your Caesar?”

  “A few years behind me, but I remember the three parts of Gaul.”

  “I taught school here more years than the bottom’s got oysters. Retired eighteen years now. You passed my grammar school coming out.”

  “I think I passed everything—your school, the grocery, the church.”

  “The historical marker at the church—did you see it?”

  “I read it.”

  “I wrote it. They limit you to forty-two words on the official state markers. Not much, but it’s all cast in bronze. I like that. Runs in the family. My father was an ironmaster—a skilled blacksmith. Worked with the watermen all his life. Repaired sailing ships. Oh, but it was an art in his hammer.” She swung her arm to show me. “Like this. Tap, tap, tap, atap, BANG! When they packed me off to the academy in Baltimore, I wanted to study something in the mechanical field—like ironworking, a strong and lasting craft. When my grandmother heard about that, she went hobble-dee-hoy. Wouldn’t have a granddaughter in that work! Today
, I could have been the oldest living woman blacksmith on the bay. Miz Smithy of Smith Island. So much for that.”

  Alice Middleton was born in Somerset County on the Eastern Shore but in 1915 moved to the six-by-four-mile island. Her husband and elder daughter died some years ago and her younger daughter lived in Princess Anne on the Shore, so now Miz Alice was alone with a cat named Jersey Red and a small nameless stray that attacked anything that moved.

  “We’ve had electricity on the island for only the last twenty-nine years. Phones for less than that. We’ve been a rustic tribe.” She paused. “Tea or a jigger of wine?”

  “A jigger, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Pull a glass from the cupboard—don’t get a chipped one.” She put a small pot of water on to heat, and we sat at her kitchen table, and she talked. After ten minutes when the water still had not come to a boil, she said, “See if we have a frog in the pot.”

  I looked. “No frog but a million bubbles.”

  “So we’ve answered that question.” She moved yesterday’s Baltimore Sun out of the way and pushed forward a cup in her favorite pattern—Copper Lustre Tea Leaf—to have it ready for the pouring. “Now, here’s about John Smith, the Pocahontas John Smith. First white man to visit our island. Named after him. He was out looking for harbors and salt for the Jamestown colony in sixteen oh eight. In his log he mentions the island and says the waters teemed so with fish that when he dipped a ship’s skillet overboard it filled with several species. Got stung by a ray for his dipping, but he liked the bay islands. He thought heaven and earth had never agreed better in framing a place for man. He said it best in four words, ‘The land is kind.’ Somewhere in America they should cast those words in bronze. Cast them big. THE LAND, MY FRIENDS, IS KIND. But for years this was a dark and bloody ground during the fighting between the watermen of Maryland and Virginia. The Oyster Wars. They couldn’t agree on who had the right to which oystering rocks. Killed each other over an inch. Then the oysters began dying out in the lower end of the bay—a parasite called MSX did it—and that’s when the warring stopped. People said MSX was the hand of God.”