Tuesday was an amazing day. Long. Exhausting. But wonderful.
Monday night after Teavolve Heather and I drove an hour and a half out to the Eastern Shore – down 97, out 50, over the Bay Bridge in high winds, through nostalgic small towns that remind Heather of high school and me of old girlfriends. We pass through Easton and into the small town of Royal Oak which probably doesn’t have much if anything to do with the old boat that Tinsmith sings about…
And in darkness we wind through tiny towns and then head straight down a marginally-not-dirt-road through dense forests until the world ends.
I’m still trying to completely understand our connection with this place, but our friend Busy Graham’s… retreat? Estate? Other home? Family home? Is ours for the night and tomorrow and it is beautiful.
We leave the doors open, nothing but screens between us and the outside, nothing but a narrow spit of land between us and the bay. Finally the world is beginning to agree with the calendar, and between the gentle sound of the water there’s the constant standing wave form susurrus of breezes through the trees. After the tumult of rain back in Baltimore with its shrieking winds, it’s a relaxing, beautiful moment.
I get to appreciate it for a good long time, totally failing to fall asleep till a grey day dawns outside. I’m up an hour or two later when my alarm goes off at 7.30am…
Exploring.
The Chesapeake Bay is a unique creature in my experience. It’s not a rolling river with the connectivity and travel and romance implied. The Mississippi connects Saint Louis to New Orleans and somehow you can sense the flow of culture and food and people and music from one to the other. It’s not an ocean with rolling waves crashing against the shore with all that transference of violence and energy. It’s not a lake – neither small enough like the local bodies of water that really just act as placid landing spots for ducks nor the massive entities like the Great Lakes outside of Chicago, easy to mistake as their own oceans, just as pulled and plied by tides and winds and storms…
Heather and I spent some time exploring a little weird corner of antique shops after the shows…. Sad giraffe. No entry to the exit.
No, the Chesapeake Bay, at least today, is a grey, slinking creature that reads as… well, as above – as the end of the world. It’s a vast flat plane of water that reflects what the sky throws at it and provides passage for distant sail boats and hunting grounds for closer-in raptors. A bald eagle swoops over my head late in the afternoon as I sit playing guitar to the leaden skies….
We have our own Chesapeake Bay Monster (Chessie), the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, sports teams, businesses and shanties. Eastern Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay is practically a whole other state.
And it’s beautiful, and quiet, and at the turning of the seasons, strangely bereft of Life…
This morning we got up early, drank coffee and ate bananas, and made our way out to play in two “Outreach” concerts that by description had me thinking they’d be similar to our experiences in Coffeyville, Kansas. “Outreach” concerts first for a community of “adults with disabilities” and second for a senior community. The second show was pretty much exactly what I thought it was but the first…
Well, we entered into a FACTORY environment, which was NOT what I was expecting! Dozens of people bent over tasks, the noise of machinery and thwackings and clangings. It was hard to believe we’d be playing a show there…. but we were shown to one of the factory rooms where our space was laid out in yellow and black safety tape, a sound man was waiting and a nifty mosaic backdrop was set up. Shortly thereafter a loud buzzer sounded and people left their tasks : making linen cloths and crab mallets among other things – and they came and sat and sang along and were frankly one of the best audiences we’ve had in a while.
So… what we’d walked into : “Chesapeake Center, Inc. envisions a caring community in which individuals with disabilities become empowered to demonstrate their choice of residence, career, friends, and activities where they are safe from abuse, neglect, recrimination, and ridicule.”
People were bring employed assembling all sorts of things, including a Naval contract making carefully sewn wiping cloths for flushing and cleaning nuclear machinery above submarines.
Go figure.
Kristen had to head home for another gig, but Heather and I got up to mischief for the rest of the day, first at an antique shop, then just exploring the area around our sanctuary, looking for shells and discovering snakes and taking selfies and things. We played music and hung out till it was time to go home and resume the stressors of Life closer to the Big City….
While exploring we found lots of grasshoppers… by accident I chased one into the water… Heather rescued it… Someone… or something… has been here before us.
Don’t know what’s being kept in there. Don’t wanna know. Thought he was fake.
He was NOT fake.Kristen heard glass shattering last night… we think we figured it out. Couldnt’ get a good photograph, but good a good SWOOP or three out of the bald eagle Living next door…
