Loch Raven: The Height of Summer

The last of a seasonal series from Loch Raven, these photos were taken on two separate trips to the southern reaches of the lake - one by water from the Loch Raven Fishing Center off Dulaney Valley Road, and another on foot using the fire road to Dead Man's Cove.  

Delaware: Slaughter Beach

The tail end of my second year of residency training. After a final overnight call in the hospital,  I drag myself deliriously away from the ICU, where I've spent the better part of a month, and up the block back to home. It's a beautiful Friday noon, and Baltimore is in the full swing of summer. A lovely thing about my seven-minute walk from work to home: from the top of Washington Hill as I cross Fayette Street, to the west I can see clear across downtown, and to the south I can see over a mile to the waterways of Fells Point.  Somehow, I'm both somnambulating and seeing my city with fresh eyes. In our apartment, Jane has the bags packed for yet another overnight trip to the Delmarva Peninsula. After I wake from a brief nap, we load the car with our daypacks, my tripod, and the camp chair in front of the shoe rack (Honeydew's throne).  Jane takes us out of the city and down the 97 past Annapolis. Crossing the Bay Bridge, even half-in-a-dream, never gets old.

There's some traffic on our journey across the Eastern Shore. It's a beach weekend if I've ever seen one - a sweltering, radiant day fit only for loud country music and a bucket of drinks. Where once there were pumpkin patches and apple orchards on our way to Smith Island, snow-cone stands now populate the roadside, beckoning us mile after mile. Shortly after 4 PM, we check in at the Day's Inn in Milford, DE, a sleepy colonial town with little going for it but the methadone clinic and the peninsular highways that transect it. Jane and I deliberate our options for an early dinner,  including ordering Chinese takeout to the motel; we settle on the Popeye's Chicken across the parking lot. After fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and macaroni & cheese, I sleep like an infant.

At half past six, I awaken to find Jane flipping between sci-fi and gardening. For us, the motel room television is a rare treat.  We head back to the car and speed off along the coastline, past farmsteads with neat lanes of loblolly, and low-lying marshlands winding toward the sea. At Slaughter Beach, ten minutes  away, we park the car beside the firehouse and, camp chair in tow, cross the sand dunes and beach grass on bare feet. There are a few other beachgoers here; a lady and two dogs go by on a upright paddleboard, each wearing respectively sized life vests. We have arrived two days after the new moon, and two days too late for the summer spring tide, which brings with it the frenzied mating of horseshoe crabs emerging from the sea all along the Delaware Bay. The air is thick with the smell of the coastal summer - the heavy odor of a thousand crustaceans rotting under the setting sun, their carapaces picked clean by the gleeful seabirds, who feed here in great flocks on their northbound flight to the Arctic.

The sky now assumes the warm, soft hues of salmon and tangerine as the sun dips beneath the coastal wetlands to our west. With twilight come the insects - hundreds of mosquitoes and blackflies that come for our hands, eyes, faces, and feet. We sit and enjoy the lapping of the ocean waves until we can no longer stand them, then beat a hasty retreat back to the car. Jane stares with morbid curiosity at the dozens of welts all over my arms and legs. On our way back into town, we stop at the local Wawa, where Friday night has brought a fleet of pickup trucks blaring country radio from boomboxes. We buy ourselves two bottles of fruit juice and refreshing iced tea before returning to the motel, where it's leftover Popeye's and cable TV until the wee hours of the morning.

Baltimore: Butchers Hill Blossoms

Another year's winter has come and gone. The days are lengthening, the skies brightening, the morning chill giving way suddenly to sunshine and balmy winds blowing in from the bay.  The Canada geese depart from the pond in Patterson Park, and in their place arrive mallards and migrating warblers. The trees ring out with the songs of nesting robins and blackbirds, and the tender, green buds that began to tint their branches in late March suddenly open overnight, plunging us into a world of life and color. These are the best two weeks for long, meandering walks around East Baltimore, stopping to admire flowering trees that have become like old neighbors.

These photos showcase the cherry trees and magnolias that  bloom beside the Patterson Park pagoda in early April; and the Kanzan and Shogetsu cultivars that line the sidewalks of Butchers Hill, Upper Fells point, and Washington Hill,  which usually flower in mid-April.