Our next destination is one that has been a long time coming. In early 2016, I read books by Tom Horton and William Warner on the eve of a weekend jaunt to Delaware and the Eastern Shore, which sparked my interest in the Bay and all its environs. Then, at Antietam after our courthouse wedding last March, Jane and I met another California-born couple who, over breakfast, shared with us their favorite places from half a lifetime traveling around the Chesapeake. They told us of a disappearing island paradise on Maryland's southern maritime border, of a tiny fishing community forgotten by the world on either side of the bay, and of quiet evenings spent out on the water, watching the sun drop below the horizon. Around then, we resolved to visit Smith Island - one of Maryland's most remote corners, and one of the Mid-Atlantic's most uniquely, breathtakingly beautiful places. So it was that earlier in the fall, we placed a call to Susan Evans, a 13th-generation Smith Islander who runs a bed-and-breakfast out of her house in Ewell (the largest of three settlements on the island); she generously agreed to host us through the first weekend of November, as her last guests of the season. We also extended the front side of our trip, in order to spend a day exploring the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge south of Cambridge, and a night staying at the inn on Tilghman Island's Black Walnut Point.
We leave for the Eastern Shore after rush hour on a Thursday morning, a few days after I finish a rotation in the cancer center, and nearly half a year after our honeymoon. The car is loaded down with our photography and walking gear, and bags of dried fruit, tangerines, and trail mix from the Trader Joe's in Towson. It's a mild, warm day with blue skies, and as we drive over the Bay Bridge, the estuary hundreds of feet below us expands into a horizon of shining sea as far as the eye can see - a sight I can never grow tired of. Leaving Kent Island and the shopping outlets of Queenstown behind, we head south past towns like Easton and Cambridge, crossing over fabled Chesapeake rivers and creeks whose lovely names seem to roll off the tongue, like the Wye, the Choptank, the Nanticoke, and the Wicomico. The landscape gradually shifts and blends through shades and textures - from drive-thru restaurants and wasteland suburbia, to rolling farmsteads selling apples, pumpkins, and peaches at roadside stands, to empty expanses of marsh flanked by brackish water and loblolly pine. We arrive at the Blackwater Refuge in the mid-morning after approximately two hours of driving.
We first take a gander around the visitor center. An older gentleman volunteering at the cash register, seeing our binoculars, shows us to a stack of free bird-watching books and pamphlets. We buy our first fridge magnet of the trip (a porcelain Canada goose in flight) before going upstairs to see exhibits on the refuge's history and flora and fauna, complete with taxidermied falcons, eagles, and Delmarva fox squirrels. There is a school group from Baltimore visiting the center as well; we watch from the upstairs balcony as the city kids explore the refuge garden with their teacher, getting into the flowers and soil, chasing the migrating monarchs, and screaming with delight. With our fridge magnet in tow, we return to the car to take a driving tour around the refuge.
The refuge road follows the Blackwater River, which flows along the marsh before emptying into the Chesapeake Bay. At the northeast edge of the marsh, we leave our car at a picnic area and set off on a short stroll through a mature pine grove. With their bundles of green needles, the canopies of the loblollies tower over us, admixed with the fiery golds, oranges, and crimsons of autumn beech, ash, and hickory. In part thanks to a mild, warm October, the deciduous leaves here in the Chesapeake are just now reaching their peak colors, and we are lucky enough to be traveling to witness a palette of coastal woodlands that nearly rivals the great autumns of New England. I take a few pictures of Jane on the forest trail, with the trees soaring into the blue sky around her. Continuing along the refuge's wildlife drive, we spend our morning and early afternoon exploring the boardwalks around the marshes, with their beautiful spans of salt grass and bulrushes, their tall phragmite reeds standing shoulder-high in the water. The air is speckled with monarch butterflies, latecomers on their southern migration, accompanied by ducks and blue herons. Here at the transition between the Bay and its shore, the evidence of the shifting global climate abounds; we pass sunken glades of decaying hardwood where the saltwater has invaded quickly enough to kill all plant life, and wetland habitats where the mud and grass are now covered at any time or tide. Everywhere here, the land is steadily losing ground to the sea - as it is throughout the Delmarva Peninsula and the Chesapeake Islands, many of which will cease to exist in another century or less. It is one of many reasons I write this all out: our children will not see the Mid-Atlantic, understand its animal and plant life, or fall in love with its landscapes, moods, and contours, the way that Jane and I have.
Completing the circuit drive around the refuge, Jane and I return to the town of Cambridge along Egypt Road. It's mid-afternoon now, and we snack on dried mango and beef jerky in the car to tide over our stomachs before our next stop, for lunch. We backtrack north along the Ocean Gateway (US-50), turning west at Easton, crossing the Miles River at the head of its broad estuary to reach a bayside peninsula dotted with fishing harbors, sailing clubs, and old Victorian homes. We pass through the maritime town of St. Michaels, with its shops and museums and seafood restaurants, following the road as it curves west and then south, through forests and fields of wheat. At the southern tip of the peninsula, we cross the little drawbridge over the Knapps Narrows and arrive on Tilghman Island, a tiny town (population just over 800) occupying an area of 2 square miles (and falling). We stop at the Tilghman Island Country Store, a bright red, cabin-sized store with a glowing neon "Open" in the window, and a wooden signpost out front advertising ice cream from "Scottish Highland creameries". Fact or fiction, we are amenable to this proposition, and a few minutes later are sitting on the bench out front, with sandwiches, a bag of chips, and two scoops of hand-churned chocolate ice cream.
We continue a mile down the road, past a meteorological station perched on the shore, and through a double gate and onto the driveway of the Black Walnut Point Inn. The Inn is a lovely old Victorian house, built in the 1840s and now converted to a bed-and-breakfast. It sits on the southern tip of Tilghman Island; its gables look out onto a beautiful flower garden and a grass lawn that extends to the edge of the bay, and its grounds are surrounded by a several-acre sanctuary for migrating birds and butterflies. Jane and I leave the car in a gravel lot in front of the house, walking past a turkey pen and a small vegetable garden to get to the inn's trailer office. There, we meet Tracy and his husband Bob, who give us a tour of the house and check us into the Bay Room on the second floor - a bright, cerulean-accented room decorated with the effects of the sea. We make ourselves at home - Jane settling in for a short nap on a shorebird throw pillow, while I flip through a book about Chesapeake workboats. A gentle breeze from the Bay blows in through our windows, and the late afternoon sun paints the lawn and the water beyond a shimmering gold.
After a break, we take a stroll outside around the garden. We walk across the lawn to the water, where I take portraits of Jane on the seawall. As the sun dips toward the horizon, we climb back in the car and head back into town for dinner, only to find that virtually every place of business has closed early for the night (it is just past 5:30 in the evening). Like hungry, forlorn ghosts haunting a restaurant, we peer into the totally dark interior of the seafood joint by the drawbridge before retreating to the island's reliable Country Store. The store owner there is closing up shop as well, but gifts us packets of garlic bread and leftovers from lunch. We buy drinks (chocolate milk) to go with a delicious dinner of homemade beef lasagna, stuffed peppers, and wild rice. We return to the inn, where we have the entire house to ourselves for the evening; after microwaving our dinner and scrounging for utensils in the kitchen, we sit around the dining table and talk wistfully about someday owning a little house on the edge of nowhere, where everyone is home by dark, and life moves a little more slowly and less purposefully.
The next morning, I sneak out of the house before dawn to walk around the garden and photograph the sun coming up over the bay. Bob and Tracy prepare a breakfast spread of vegetable quiche, potato hash with apples and sausages, and walnut pancakes with maple syrup, which we wash down with mugs of fresh coffee and orange juice. After breakfast, we load the car and say goodbye to the turkeys (who are all strangely interested in Jane's orange hiking pack). We head north past the radar tower, off the island through sleepy Talbot County, until we are back on the main highway across the Delmarva Peninsula. This time we're bound not for the beaches of Ocean City or Assateague, but for the southern port town of Crisfield, and the morning mail ferry to Smith Island.
