Jul. 19th, 2004 02:41 pm
Nostalgic journey over back roads
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muckefuckI've been spending the morning struggling to stay awake. In between horribly decaying auction catalogs, I've been doing web searches on places in Dorchester (say "DORE-chuh-sturr") County and thinking I should right up my visit to my grandparents' graves before I forget more details.
At first, it looked like we wouldn't go at all. On the second day in Virginia, when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bunj pointed out that it was a four hours each way, my sister's face just fell. "I can't do that to my kids," she told us. I was crushed. Later in the week, when my stepmother asked me, how important the trip was to me, I felt compelled to be honest and tell her that it's all that convinced me to come along (though I chose the more diplomatic formulation "tipped the balance".) I had basically no interest in wasting vacation time and ticket money on either Williamsburg or another debacle like the one that closed the Utah vacation.
I really owe a great debt of gratitude to my family for making things work. We realised that we could combine the side trip with a day at the beach, something my sister and her family were looking forward to tremendously (they'd thought that VA Beach was much closer than it was), and my parents' route out through Baltimore. Originally, we were thinking of Ocean City, but (fortunately, IMHO) that didn't work out: Everything was booked up for July 4th weekend. We eventually found something just south of Princess Anne in Somerset County. (Hotels.com utterly failed to secure our reservation online, so we ended up calling.)
We left around midmorning on Friday, caravaned across the Bay Bridge-Tunnel, made it to Assateague Island by early afternoon, and spent much of the day there. Then we drove northwest to the motel, changed for dinner, and ate crabs in Crisfield. (I may yet write all this up, too.) The next morning, I got into the passenger seat of Dad's truck. My stepmom and older brother sat in back, snoozing much of the way, as I took up the atlas and played navigator. We took U.S. 13 up to and around Salisbury (say "Saul's Berry"), the largest town on the Eastern Shore, where we caught U.S. 50 heading northwest, passing within a mile of the Delaware border.
All along the highway were roadside stands selling fresh produce (especially sweet corn) and "antiques". There were some beautiful old frame farmhouses and the black-eyed susans were in full bloom; some fields were so thick with them, they looked like a crop. As we passed Mardela Springs, my father told me an incident from his days teaching high school there. It seems that, around the same time, the school had hired a new librarian from elsewhere. She realised that there were no travel books to speak of and ordered several. A few years later, she reviewed the circulation records and noted that not a single one of them had ever been checked out. Dad saw in this proof that natives regarded the Eastern Shore as the best place in the world and couldn't understand why anyone would ever think of living anywhere else.
It was almost lunchtime before we made it to the outskirts of Cambridge. Our original plan had been to eat together here or in nearby Madison, but it was rapidly becoming apparent that there wouldn't be time for that. At the turnoff to Route 16, I saw a grizzled old man with some bushel baskets and a sign advertising live crabs. As we circled round the town to the south, Dad rattled off his recollections of it. My grandma had lived here for a few years before moving out to stay with her daughter in Kansas (I know I've mentioned here before, the ultra-Catholic with a dozen kids), but I'd never visited her there.
We made pretty good time to the hamlet of Church Creek, where I saw a folksy-looking cafe that I would've loved to lunch at. From there, we took Rte. 335 through the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. Unless I miss my guess, we passed over the very bridge that my granddaddy talked about fishing off of on a local t.v. show called Gone fishin'. (One side is in the refuge and the other isn't; granddaddy contrasts the fishing off the two sides, thus confessing on a camera to committing a federal crime.) My father has a videotape of the episode and it's the only way I know what his father's voice sounds likes. I can summon up my grandma's without half trying--we talked to her on the phone all the time as I was growing up--but memories of my granddaddy's are too faint and remote.
We passed through what MapQuest show as two tiny hamlets but which, to us, were merely wide spots in the road. There was an old family plot where one of the back roads, called "Hip Roof Road", intersected the highway. We starting noticing signs for Golden Hill, which supposedly takes its name from a legend of buried Spanish gold. (Damned if I could see anything resembling a hill anywhere in the whole county; it's flater than Chicago.) It consisted of a few houses culminating in a t-junction in front of Gootee's Marine [sic]. Here we hung a right and--following the directions of my dad's younger brother--turned north at the head of the "Honga River" (really, a brackish sound) onto Smithville Road. We all kept our eyes peeled for a white church. "Chris said if you come to a bridge, you've gone too far." We did see a roadside church, but it was small and brown. And then we were back to the Blackwater River, which means we'd gone too far. There was an old couple there fishing, so I tried to ask them directions, but they weren't from around those parts.
So we turned around and kept looking. Dad and my stepmom got into a discussion about the church; she thought that might've been it, but he was adamant that it was the wrong colour, on the wrong side of the road. We debated stopping at one of the houses to ask directions, but Dad was reluctant until we saw a coupla guys out front working on their truck. I asked them where to find the Catholic church and they directed me right back to the brown Protestant church we'd passed. Dad couldn't get cell phone reception to call anyone and we figured our best bet was to get back to the marina and ask there. We turned onto Hip Roof Road, which was unfortunately not the fastest way back.
Once on the parking lot of the marina (oyster shells bleached blinding white by the sun, which takes the place of gravel down there), my sister started feeding her children lunch in the hopes of warding off problems down the line. Dad was talking to a man who might've been Mr Gootee, Jr. himself; another local was listening in. When the proprietor told us the church was just past a bend, the other man asked, "Is that the bend where [local man] flipped his truck a couple years back?" It was. Not only that, they were having a wedding there later in the afternoon. He told us not to turn off Rte. 335 but to keep going past a big, fancy house "that looks like it don't belong". Soon enough, we'd hit the bend and see the white walls of the chapel and church.
He was spot on. Dad spotted Tubman Chapel (rebuilt in the 18th century on the site of a 17th century church) on the right and knew we'd found it. (I don't know if there's a connexion to Harriet Tubman or not. The chapel is named for a local landowner and she was born just a little north of there on the Thompson plantation in an area called "Peter's Neck" that I can't find on any map.) We pulled into the lot by the 19th century church St. Mary, Star of the Sea on the left-hand side, parked, and piled out. It's not even a parish, just a mission operated out of St. Mary, Refuge of Sinners in Cambridge.
The last time I'd been here, nineteen years earlier, the mosquitos had been horrible. I vividly remember sitting in the car with my siblings while Dad and Grandma visited the gravesite and watching them land on the windows and peck. So this time, I doused myself with Dad's super-extra-strength repellant. I charged ahead and found the headstones. A small plastic flag had been stuck in front of granddaddy's on account of him being a WWII veteran. When he showed up with his parents, my nephew AWI started playing with it. It was just like the last time I'd been with him to a graveyard, where he tried to uproot all the tiny flags and pinwheels, only this time he actually heeded his parents when they told him to stop. I thought we'd have an abbreviated service of some sort, but we just chatted as I looked at the graves.
My stepmom, in keeping with her tradition, placed stones on the gravestones and I was stricken to realise that I hadn't thought of bringing anything--not even flowers. I rushed back to the parking lot, desperate for a pebble in a land that just doesn't grow any, and managed to find a few small shiny black ones. I left one for each of my grandparents. Everyone else was already heading back; my stepmom put her arm around me as I told her about my memories of granddaddy's funeral. I'd fallen asleep in the car and my parents had left me there. When I woke up, I wandered toward the crowd and an older female relative--I've no idea who--took me hand and took me toward the grave. We eneded up standing on the opposite side from my father. I knew he looked solemn, but I don't think I really understood what was happening.
We started heading back, then I pulled away to pluck a few wildflowers and deposite them on my grandma's grave. My older brother was lingering near the edge of the churchyard, so I borrowed his camera to photograph a few striking old gravestones for a couple named "Vachel" (son of "Zebulon") and "Keziah" Keenes. There was definitely no stopping for lunch now, not if I was going to make my flight out of Baltimore-Washington International (which Dad insists on calling "Frienship", just as I still say "Lambert" when I mean "St. Louis International"), so we all said our goodbyes in the parking lot.
We took the Smithville road, which runs just east of Taylor's Island, back north. When we crossed the Blackwater, the fishing couple at the bridge were gone. It hooked up with Route 16 and we took that through a couple of tiny hamlets back to Church Creek and thence to Cambridge. Along the way, as we approached Madison (once known as "Tobacco Stick"), Dad tried to signal to the other car that we were passing the turnoff to my grandparent's old place, which he called "the Marina."
It'd been nearly two decades since I'd been passed this turnoff, but it hadn't changed. The east side was a farm field; the west side was solid loblolly pines. The last time we'd driven down it to visit grandma, we'd spent the afternoon playing at the "marina" proper. This was a tidal pool connected to the Little Choptank by a creek so small that, even as children, we could wade across it. As the tide starting going out in the evening, the current began sucking blue crabs out of the pool so we run up to the house for a dip net and a bucket. We managed to catch three crabs that were big enough to eat and my older brother kept the claw (most mature crabs are left with only one) from the largest one.
Needless to say, there was no prospect today of even driving by the house, with the small drainage ditch out front (ubiquitous in this marshy country) bridged by planks and the easter lily in the yard, that my grandfather, a carpentar as well as a farmer, had built. Lunch was sandwiches grabbed from a Subway in overdeveloped, touristy Cambridge and the next hour or so was spent barrelling up U.S. 50 to the Bay Bridge while keeping watch for podunk policemen trying to fulfil their ticket quotas.
I'm still trying to sort out what it means to me. The feelings of nostalgia are of an intensity disproportionate to my memories. After all, we lived north of Baltimore. If you add up all the time we spent on the Eastern Shore visiting my grandparents, I doubt it even makes two weeks. Granddaddy died when I was five-and-a-half; I have only one memory of him that I'm convinced is genuine and not cobbled together from others' stories and photographs.
At first, it looked like we wouldn't go at all. On the second day in Virginia, when
bunj pointed out that it was a four hours each way, my sister's face just fell. "I can't do that to my kids," she told us. I was crushed. Later in the week, when my stepmother asked me, how important the trip was to me, I felt compelled to be honest and tell her that it's all that convinced me to come along (though I chose the more diplomatic formulation "tipped the balance".) I had basically no interest in wasting vacation time and ticket money on either Williamsburg or another debacle like the one that closed the Utah vacation.I really owe a great debt of gratitude to my family for making things work. We realised that we could combine the side trip with a day at the beach, something my sister and her family were looking forward to tremendously (they'd thought that VA Beach was much closer than it was), and my parents' route out through Baltimore. Originally, we were thinking of Ocean City, but (fortunately, IMHO) that didn't work out: Everything was booked up for July 4th weekend. We eventually found something just south of Princess Anne in Somerset County. (Hotels.com utterly failed to secure our reservation online, so we ended up calling.)
We left around midmorning on Friday, caravaned across the Bay Bridge-Tunnel, made it to Assateague Island by early afternoon, and spent much of the day there. Then we drove northwest to the motel, changed for dinner, and ate crabs in Crisfield. (I may yet write all this up, too.) The next morning, I got into the passenger seat of Dad's truck. My stepmom and older brother sat in back, snoozing much of the way, as I took up the atlas and played navigator. We took U.S. 13 up to and around Salisbury (say "Saul's Berry"), the largest town on the Eastern Shore, where we caught U.S. 50 heading northwest, passing within a mile of the Delaware border.
All along the highway were roadside stands selling fresh produce (especially sweet corn) and "antiques". There were some beautiful old frame farmhouses and the black-eyed susans were in full bloom; some fields were so thick with them, they looked like a crop. As we passed Mardela Springs, my father told me an incident from his days teaching high school there. It seems that, around the same time, the school had hired a new librarian from elsewhere. She realised that there were no travel books to speak of and ordered several. A few years later, she reviewed the circulation records and noted that not a single one of them had ever been checked out. Dad saw in this proof that natives regarded the Eastern Shore as the best place in the world and couldn't understand why anyone would ever think of living anywhere else.
It was almost lunchtime before we made it to the outskirts of Cambridge. Our original plan had been to eat together here or in nearby Madison, but it was rapidly becoming apparent that there wouldn't be time for that. At the turnoff to Route 16, I saw a grizzled old man with some bushel baskets and a sign advertising live crabs. As we circled round the town to the south, Dad rattled off his recollections of it. My grandma had lived here for a few years before moving out to stay with her daughter in Kansas (I know I've mentioned here before, the ultra-Catholic with a dozen kids), but I'd never visited her there.
We made pretty good time to the hamlet of Church Creek, where I saw a folksy-looking cafe that I would've loved to lunch at. From there, we took Rte. 335 through the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. Unless I miss my guess, we passed over the very bridge that my granddaddy talked about fishing off of on a local t.v. show called Gone fishin'. (One side is in the refuge and the other isn't; granddaddy contrasts the fishing off the two sides, thus confessing on a camera to committing a federal crime.) My father has a videotape of the episode and it's the only way I know what his father's voice sounds likes. I can summon up my grandma's without half trying--we talked to her on the phone all the time as I was growing up--but memories of my granddaddy's are too faint and remote.
We passed through what MapQuest show as two tiny hamlets but which, to us, were merely wide spots in the road. There was an old family plot where one of the back roads, called "Hip Roof Road", intersected the highway. We starting noticing signs for Golden Hill, which supposedly takes its name from a legend of buried Spanish gold. (Damned if I could see anything resembling a hill anywhere in the whole county; it's flater than Chicago.) It consisted of a few houses culminating in a t-junction in front of Gootee's Marine [sic]. Here we hung a right and--following the directions of my dad's younger brother--turned north at the head of the "Honga River" (really, a brackish sound) onto Smithville Road. We all kept our eyes peeled for a white church. "Chris said if you come to a bridge, you've gone too far." We did see a roadside church, but it was small and brown. And then we were back to the Blackwater River, which means we'd gone too far. There was an old couple there fishing, so I tried to ask them directions, but they weren't from around those parts.
So we turned around and kept looking. Dad and my stepmom got into a discussion about the church; she thought that might've been it, but he was adamant that it was the wrong colour, on the wrong side of the road. We debated stopping at one of the houses to ask directions, but Dad was reluctant until we saw a coupla guys out front working on their truck. I asked them where to find the Catholic church and they directed me right back to the brown Protestant church we'd passed. Dad couldn't get cell phone reception to call anyone and we figured our best bet was to get back to the marina and ask there. We turned onto Hip Roof Road, which was unfortunately not the fastest way back.
Once on the parking lot of the marina (oyster shells bleached blinding white by the sun, which takes the place of gravel down there), my sister started feeding her children lunch in the hopes of warding off problems down the line. Dad was talking to a man who might've been Mr Gootee, Jr. himself; another local was listening in. When the proprietor told us the church was just past a bend, the other man asked, "Is that the bend where [local man] flipped his truck a couple years back?" It was. Not only that, they were having a wedding there later in the afternoon. He told us not to turn off Rte. 335 but to keep going past a big, fancy house "that looks like it don't belong". Soon enough, we'd hit the bend and see the white walls of the chapel and church.
He was spot on. Dad spotted Tubman Chapel (rebuilt in the 18th century on the site of a 17th century church) on the right and knew we'd found it. (I don't know if there's a connexion to Harriet Tubman or not. The chapel is named for a local landowner and she was born just a little north of there on the Thompson plantation in an area called "Peter's Neck" that I can't find on any map.) We pulled into the lot by the 19th century church St. Mary, Star of the Sea on the left-hand side, parked, and piled out. It's not even a parish, just a mission operated out of St. Mary, Refuge of Sinners in Cambridge.
The last time I'd been here, nineteen years earlier, the mosquitos had been horrible. I vividly remember sitting in the car with my siblings while Dad and Grandma visited the gravesite and watching them land on the windows and peck. So this time, I doused myself with Dad's super-extra-strength repellant. I charged ahead and found the headstones. A small plastic flag had been stuck in front of granddaddy's on account of him being a WWII veteran. When he showed up with his parents, my nephew AWI started playing with it. It was just like the last time I'd been with him to a graveyard, where he tried to uproot all the tiny flags and pinwheels, only this time he actually heeded his parents when they told him to stop. I thought we'd have an abbreviated service of some sort, but we just chatted as I looked at the graves.
My stepmom, in keeping with her tradition, placed stones on the gravestones and I was stricken to realise that I hadn't thought of bringing anything--not even flowers. I rushed back to the parking lot, desperate for a pebble in a land that just doesn't grow any, and managed to find a few small shiny black ones. I left one for each of my grandparents. Everyone else was already heading back; my stepmom put her arm around me as I told her about my memories of granddaddy's funeral. I'd fallen asleep in the car and my parents had left me there. When I woke up, I wandered toward the crowd and an older female relative--I've no idea who--took me hand and took me toward the grave. We eneded up standing on the opposite side from my father. I knew he looked solemn, but I don't think I really understood what was happening.
We started heading back, then I pulled away to pluck a few wildflowers and deposite them on my grandma's grave. My older brother was lingering near the edge of the churchyard, so I borrowed his camera to photograph a few striking old gravestones for a couple named "Vachel" (son of "Zebulon") and "Keziah" Keenes. There was definitely no stopping for lunch now, not if I was going to make my flight out of Baltimore-Washington International (which Dad insists on calling "Frienship", just as I still say "Lambert" when I mean "St. Louis International"), so we all said our goodbyes in the parking lot.
We took the Smithville road, which runs just east of Taylor's Island, back north. When we crossed the Blackwater, the fishing couple at the bridge were gone. It hooked up with Route 16 and we took that through a couple of tiny hamlets back to Church Creek and thence to Cambridge. Along the way, as we approached Madison (once known as "Tobacco Stick"), Dad tried to signal to the other car that we were passing the turnoff to my grandparent's old place, which he called "the Marina."
It'd been nearly two decades since I'd been passed this turnoff, but it hadn't changed. The east side was a farm field; the west side was solid loblolly pines. The last time we'd driven down it to visit grandma, we'd spent the afternoon playing at the "marina" proper. This was a tidal pool connected to the Little Choptank by a creek so small that, even as children, we could wade across it. As the tide starting going out in the evening, the current began sucking blue crabs out of the pool so we run up to the house for a dip net and a bucket. We managed to catch three crabs that were big enough to eat and my older brother kept the claw (most mature crabs are left with only one) from the largest one.
Needless to say, there was no prospect today of even driving by the house, with the small drainage ditch out front (ubiquitous in this marshy country) bridged by planks and the easter lily in the yard, that my grandfather, a carpentar as well as a farmer, had built. Lunch was sandwiches grabbed from a Subway in overdeveloped, touristy Cambridge and the next hour or so was spent barrelling up U.S. 50 to the Bay Bridge while keeping watch for podunk policemen trying to fulfil their ticket quotas.
I'm still trying to sort out what it means to me. The feelings of nostalgia are of an intensity disproportionate to my memories. After all, we lived north of Baltimore. If you add up all the time we spent on the Eastern Shore visiting my grandparents, I doubt it even makes two weeks. Granddaddy died when I was five-and-a-half; I have only one memory of him that I'm convinced is genuine and not cobbled together from others' stories and photographs.
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no subject
You did. If you look at a map, it is the only bridge with the refuge on one side and not the other.
I'm sorry I couldn't be there with you. We'll have to go there together some day.
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no subject
Have you been to Ocean City? I'd imagine it'd be miserable on 4 July, but I remember being in a plexiglass maze and getting totally lost, and my sister and I went on a rollercoaster that had a wooden track. We were sure that we'd die.
no subject
We've never managed to make it to Ocean City. We were supposed to go on that last trip to Grandma's, but that was the day we ended up staying home for impromptu crabbing instead. We talked about going this time, but didn't make it. One more failed attempt and it will permanently occupy the Cockaigne or Big Rock Candy Mountain spot in my mind--that magnificent pleasure spot that's always just out of reach.
no subject
I shall have to post the story of When I Went to the Eastern Shore and Came Back with a Pet Clam.
no subject
"black-eyed susans" - sind das Sonnenblumen? Die englische Bezeichnung ist sehr süss.
Ich kenne das Bedürfnis, der Vergangenheit nachzuspüren und finde es auch gleichzeitig rätselhaft. Noch vor wenigen Monaten bin ich nach der Arbeit losgefahren und habe nach Orten gesucht, an denen meine Oma lebte. Ich konnte mich genau an ein relativ großes Stromhäuschen erinnern und ein seltsames weis rotes Stahltor an den Bahngleisen. Die wenigen Sachen, die genau so waren, wie ich sie erinnerte. Gleichzeitig kamen viele Fragen auf, die mir niemand beantworten kann, da meine Geschwister jünger sind als ich und bestimmte Abschnitte gar nicht miterlebt haben. Wenn ich meine Mutter frage, kommen meisst erschöpfende Antworten wie "meinst du?" oder "weiss ich nicht". Es ist seltsam. Ich erinnere mich immer wieder an eine Holzbrücke, die durch ein Zechengelände zu einem See führte. Die Zeche und den See gibt es noch, aber keiner erinnert die Brücke. Wenn ich an sie denke, kann ich förmlich den modernden Holzgeruch in der Sonne einatmen.
Ja, mit den Emotionen ist es so eine Sache. Ein bischen Melancholie, aber ich kann es nicht wirklich einordnen. Das Grab meiner Oma, die nun 24 Jahre tot ist, meide ich seit einigen Jahren. Ich habe nur noch bis Ende 2005 oder Anfang 2006 die Chance, es zu besuchen. Danach wird das Feld für neue Tote frei gemacht.
Thanks for sharing.
no subject
Nein, Sonnenblumen sind "sunflowers". Der "black-eyed susan" (Rudbeckia hirta) ist eine Art Sonnenhut, aber nicht der purpurfarbene amerikanische Sonnenhut (den nennen wir "purple coneflower"). Die Farben sehen diejenigen von einer Sonnenblume sehr ähnlich: Ein schwarzbraunes "Auge" mit dunkelgoldenen Kronenblättern umgeringt.
Ich habe nur noch bis Ende 2005 oder Anfang 2006 die Chance, es zu besuchen. Danach wird das Feld für neue Tote frei gemacht.
Das ist nicht dein Ernst! In Deutschland wird die Friedhofe jede 50 Jahre "recyclt"?
no subject
Da meine Großeltern schon Jahrzehente getrennt lebten (ohne sich scheiden zu lassen) und keinen Kontakt mehr pflegten, wollten sie auch nach dem Tod nicht mehr das gleiche Haus bewohnen. Insofern gibt es keine Familiengruft, sondern schlichte Einzelgräber (das meines Großvaters kenne ich nicht und wahrscheinlich existiert es nicht mehr).
Für das normale Einzelgrab ist es wohl so, dass man nach 25 Jahren sein Erdhäuschen räumen muss, wenn man keine anderen Vorkehrungen zu Lebzeiten trifft und bezahlt - zumindest in meinem Geburtsort, dort wo auch meine Großeltern begraben sind. Wenn sich niemand um das Grab kümmert und es verwahrlost oder voll mit Unkraut ist, wird es schon vorher unkenntlich gemacht. Meine Mutter hat die Friedhofsgärtnerei mit der Pflege des Grabes beauftragt, so wird es immer mit den Jahreszeiten zurecht gemacht. Ansonsten hätte man es schon vor Jahren platt gemacht, da sich niemand regelmäßig kümmert.
Ich habe keine Ahnung, ob es Bundesgesetze gibt, die solche Angelegenheiten regeln. Ich vermute, nein. Insofern denke ich, dass Deutschland keine einheitlichen Regeln hat. Ich denke, es ist nicht einmal auf Landesebene einheitlich geregelt, sondern wird von Städten und Gemeinden eigenverantwortlich geregelt.
Aber werden nicht auch in den USA nach einer bestimmten Zeit die Grabflächen recyclet? Wie sollen Städte wie LA, NYC oder Chicago sonst ihre Toten bewältigen?
Apropos Friedhof: Ich hoffe, in einigen Jahren (2013?) noch einmal Gelegenheit zu haben, einen Spaziergang auf Graceland zu machen, am liebsten gemeinsam mit dir.