Blue Highways: Ewell, Maryland

Unfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) takes a boat to Smith Island for an overnight stay and a fascinating conversation with Alice Venable Middleton, at the time an octogenarian who had lived over sixty years on the island.  His conversation with her reminded me of my grandmother, who I will remember in this post.  To find Smith Island and the village of Ewell, please go to the map.  The image at right is Maryland's state dessert, the Smith Island cake.  It looks like nine layers of awesome!

Book Quote

"'I have a question for you,' I said.  'Tell me what's the hardest thing about living on a small, marshy island in Chesapeake Bay.'

"'I know that and it didn't take sixty-three years to figure it out.  Here it is, wrapped up like a parcel.  Listen to my sentence.  Having the gumption to live different and the sense to let everybody else live different.  That's the hardest thing, hands down.'"

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 14

Ewell, Smith Island, Maryland. Photo by by Jenny Myers and Tim Christion and is found at their blog Tim and Jen's Wedding. Click on photo to go to host page

Ewell, Maryland

This post is going to be about my grandmother, my mom's mother named Mary Cox, that I've mentioned briefly in couple of other posts.  In the quote above LHM is speaking to Alice Venable Middleton, a longtime resident of Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay.  He had spent the night and the better part of two days talking with her and learning about the island and in the process, her views on life.  This quote comes at the end of his interview with her and it reminds me of my grandmother.  The two women were probably only alike in a few ways - my grandmother was probably not as formally educated as Alice Venable Middleton, but they both lived their lives around fishermen in a fishing village and both seemed to have a great store of common sense built around life experiences.

My grandmother was truly, I believe, one of the last of the pioneers and as such it was my privilege to be able to listen to her stories when she was still alive.  Her family, the Hauns, were immigrants from Austria and lived in places like Michigan and Texas before settling in a remote part of Northern California where, in a little area called Branscomb, they built a little redwood lumber mill.  My grandmother grew up in this rugged area, literally hewn out of wilderness, a few miles from the Pacific coast.  Growing up in a wilderness meant that, like her pioneer forebears, she had to learn skills that would serve her well later in life.

She wanted to get an education and attend college to become a nurse, but a brief stint down near the Bay Area didn't work out.  She married a fisherman named Louis Cox and when the economy crashed in 1929, he went to work as a logger in the woods and she raised my mother and her four siblings in logging camps.  The life was difficult, but it was also something for which she was prepared thanks to how she was raised.  My mother remembers what almost seems to me like a magical childhood.  She went to school in a little red schoolhouse in the woods, and the entire redwood forest was her playground.  My grandmother kept a clean house and even in the worst of times she and my grandfather kept food on the table for their four children.

Eventually, my grandmother moved to town with her husband and four kids as the economy picked up and he was able to go back to his first occupation, fishing.  When Louis died of cancer in the early 60s, she was left widowed right around the age of 50.  Most women might have given up at that point in their lives, but my grandmother was definitely not like most women.  She went back to school and realized her dream of becoming a nurse and worked in the Mendocino Coast Hospital until her early 70s.  She bought a little house in the country where she raised horses and provided a lot of grandkids with an opportunity to ride for pleasure and in horse shows.  She made two trips to Austria to discover her heritage and remained in contact with her Austrian cousins until the end of her life.

I remember my grandmother as a stern but loving woman who did a lot for her kids and grandkids.  She was a lifelong Democrat and supporter of Franklin Roosevelt because she felt that his policies helped her family and countless others to survive.  She and I, when I got older, had lots of discussions about the state of politics.  No Democrat, in her mind, could ever hope to live up to Roosevelt and no Republican was worth talking about.  However, as liberal as she was in her economic policies, she was a social conservative.  She didn't like what she saw as sexual immorality, nor the trend of protest and drug use popular and common among the younger people of my generation and the generation before me.  She always gave me a bad time about the long hair and beard I wore then.

Yet despite her personal feelings, she never made anybody feel unwelcome.  When my friends from college came home with me, she always was extremely nice to them and would share the wonders that came out of her oven with them.  The only time I ever heard her seem prejudiced was when she told me stories about the Indians who scared her when they walked past her house when she was growing up in Branscomb.  These were most likely Native Americans from what is now known as the Round Valley Reservation.  They were often drunk, she said, and they frightened her.  When I gently suggested that the Native Americans she saw probably lived on reservations and in extreme poverty, she didn't dispute me, but she never was able to shake that early childhood memory.  Yet I have no doubt that if I had brought home a friend or a girlfriend who was Native American, or African-American, she would have been just as welcoming to them as she was to any of my friends.  I did bring home a Mexican-American friend with me a couple of times, and he was charmed by my grandmother, who said that she and the rest of us in Fort Bragg were "just backwoods bunnies."

My grandmother was living proof of what Alice Venable Middleton states in the quote above.  She had the "gumption" to live different, though the way she lived was what she knew and she didn't see it as necessarily living different but living better.  She also had the sense to let others live different.  What others did, as long as it didn't interfere with her, was their own business.  She might not have liked it or agreed with it, but she seemed to feel that people should live their own lives.  Her extended family, her kids and their kids, sometimes tested her patience, but she didn't interfere in their business unless asked.  That was "the hardest part," as Alice Venable Middleton stated it above, and my grandmother would have agreed with her.

My grandmother died at the age of 95, still living in her own home, still independent.  She was feeding her chickens when an aortic aneurysm burst and she died instantly.  We all still miss her, and most of us could use some of her well-placed and timed home-spun wisdom at times.  I credit her with firing in me an urge to travel after listening to her stories and seeing her photos of Austria.  Even in death she still serves as an inspiration to the generations that succeeded her.

Musical Interlude

This song, written and performed by Alicia Keys, was released after the death of her grandmother.  I have heard it described as being full of regret.  We all regret things that we wanted to say to our loved ones before they died.  When my grandmother died, my mother and sister were visiting me in New Orleans, and my mom was extremely upset at not having been home.  Yet my sister and I agree that my grandmother probably would have preferred it that way.  She died on her feet, feeding her chickens, and dependent on nobody.  Sure, I wish I could have seen her once again, but she went the way she wanted.  We should all be so lucky.

If you want to know more about Ewell and Smith Island

Baydreaming.com: Smith Island
New York Times interactive article: Water is Life on Smith Island
Smith Island Cultural Center
Visit Smith Island
Wikipedia: Ewell
Wikipedia: Smith Island

Next up: Oxford, Maryland

Blue Highways: Crisfield, Maryland

Unfolding the Map

As people across the United States settle down today to tuck into turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce on this unique American holiday of Thanksgiving, I will reflect on some other unique relics of America: it's small town museums and monuments.  If you're traveling back from the holidays, consider stopping in to some of these places if you run across them on the way (and if they're open!).  If you want to see where you can find the Great Pyramid of Crisfield, locate it right here on the map!

Book Quote

"'...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."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 13

A photo of the Great Pyramid of Crisfield. Photo at the MarylandNewszap.com website. Click on photo to go to host page.

Crisfield, Maryland

Some of the most interesting places that I've visited, in my years of traveling in the United States, have been the monuments and museums that are found in small towns.  Unlike other places that you might travel to when you're making your vacation trips, these are purely local and often might seem to be only of interest to the local residents.  But you are missing out on a lot if you miss these sights.

The small-town museum, for example, is a vanishing piece of Americana that can range from informative to just weird.  Many of them look like someone just started collecting stuff, and put the stuff in the building.  The better ones are usually organized around a theme.  For instance, if a town made its name as a mining town then the ongoing theme throughout the museum would be one where mining is the common thread that links all the exhibits.

However, that is not always the case in the small-town museums.  Some of them look like someone just collected knick-knacks and other junk and called it a museum.  The theme may be lost or nonexistent.  There may seem like there is no rhyme nor reason to exhibits.  Examples of local minerals might sit in a display case next to a 1920s radio that sat in someone's house before it was donated to the museum, next to which is displayed a tire that was replaced on a celebrity's car as he passed through in the 1950s.  I know that some people get a little put off or even annoyed by such disorganization, but I don't.

The reason I don't get annoyed is because my life is often organized in that kind of haphazard manner.  In that kind of disorganization, I feel at home.  Also, when things aren't organized according to any kind of discernible system, you can find incredibly interesting and sometimes very strange things just by taking your time and poking around.  Perhaps, poking around in the dusty corners, you might come across a stuffed two-headed calf or sheep that was born on a ranch 50 years prior and which was taken to the taxidermist after its death, displayed at the rancher's home until he died, and then given to the museum.  Or, you might find something gross and disgusting sitting in a 70 year old bottle of formaldehyde.  Perhaps you'll find letters written from a town society girl at the turn of the 20th century, in language that was racy for the time, to the mayor with whom she was having an affair right under the nose of her physician husband and the mayor's respected wife.

Often these types of museums are presided over by one of two kinds of people.  Either they are extremely garrulous, willing to tell you about every little thing that happened in the town in the past 150 years, or they might be extremely introverted, and annoyed if you ask them even the smallest question.  The latter type of person seems to want nothing more than for you to leave so that they can go back to passing time with the ghosts and relics of their town's past.  Both types of persons seem to be relics themselves.  They seem to be an indelible part of these little museums, and they are as much on display for anyone who cares to visit as any of the other items scattered around the rooms.

In other words, you'll find the scrapbook of life in these small town museums.  As you walk through the dusty corridors, you'll turn pages of memories of little moments and what seemed at the time to be momentous events, frozen in time in a dusty, forgotten corner of a small town museum in an out of the way corner of a small town in a corner of a rural state.

Similarly, the small monuments to this or that in little towns are also filled with meaning, sometimes just not the meaning we can immediately understand.  There are always the monuments to the wars, which one can find in various little places.  Obviously, these memorialize townspeople lost in world conflicts.

But then, one can find things like the replica of the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Crisfield.  If you wonder why the monument and time capsule was turned into a replica of the pyramid, so do I.  The answer is only in the mind of the creator.  When my wife and I were traveling across Florida, a state full of weird and strange things and creations whose full purpose were only known to their creators, we found a "Monument of States" in Kissimmee, where each state of the union contributed a rock to build a 50 foot or so high column.  It sits there, sort of forgotten.

The true treasures are the little exhibits, monuments and museums truly off the beaten path.  Near Cedar Crest, New Mexico, you can find the Tinkertown Museum, which was the brainchild of an artist who created whole little worlds made up of carved wooden figures and found objects.  It has a cousin in the UCM (Get it?  You-See-Em?) Museum in Abita Springs, Louisiana which was modeled on the same idea.  Sometimes, people just put up their own little museums in their yard, like the Bone Lady near Cerillos, New Mexico (though I'm not sure that she is still there).  There are weird little places everywhere, like the National Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin or the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California.  I still remember stopping in Virginia City, Nevada, a major tourist trap made out of a picturesque former mining town, and just off the main strip where t-shirt and trinket shops reign, there was a Museum of Radio History that was small, unpretentious and fascinating.  My wife, just beginning to get into radio journalism, loved it.

I would encourage you, if you're ever traveling, to seek out these strange places and exhibits and marvel at the care and creativity that goes into preserving the past and creating for the future.  You can find a great guide to unique attractions at Roadside America's website.  I check it out whenever I head someplace just to see if there's a sight that is unique or interesting.  Get out there and see some of this stuff, all of you Littourati out there, if only because it's uniquely, fantastically and weirdly American.

Musical Interlude

What a find for this post!  Strange Museum by Paul Weller.  Go see a few of them, people!

If you want to know more about Crisfield

Baydreaming.com: Crisfield
City of Crisfield
Crisfield Area Chamber of Commerce
Crisfield Events
Wikipedia: Crisfield

Next up: Ewell, Maryland

Blue Highways: Ocean City, Maryland

Unfolding the Map

Amidst the development of Ocean City, just recently ravaged by Hurricane Sandy, we stop for a moment to think about development decisions.  Just why do, or should, we build on barrier islands?  That's my question for the day, explored below.  Locate Ocean City by checking out the Littourati Blue Highways map.

Book Quote

"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."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 13

Aerial view of Ocean City, Maryland. Photo by Tex Jobe at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Ocean City, Maryland

I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to write with the Ocean City theme, given the shortness of the quote and its otherwise unexciting information, until I looked at Ocean City on Google Earth.  The recent landfall of Hurricane Sandy, only a category 1 hurricane on the 5 point Saffir-Simpson Scale, underscored the fragility of Ocean City and other developed areas along barrier islands.  A barrier island is basically a spit of sand, built up by tidal action, that is separated by shallow waters from the mainland.

Barrier islands have served as a much needed bulwark against such storms as Sandy, and even more powerful storms.  As a hurricane moves toward land, its rotation and energy pushes a tremendous volume of water in front of it, much like a bulldozer pushes dirt.  This surge can be augmented by tides, so that the surge will be higher if the hurricane comes ashore at high tide than it would be if the surge comes ashore at low tide.

Barrier islands, as the first pieces of land that a storm surge hits, weaken the force of the surge and spare the mainland from the main force of the water.  Buildings that are on the mainland behind barrier islands may thus get spared the main brunt of the most damaging element, water, and therefore are much more likely to survive with little or no damage.

So why, might you ask, have we built up populated areas on the very places that get the main brute force of hurricanes?

The answer is money and politics.  Barrier islands are beachfront property, and developers find beachfront property prime areas to develop with condos overlooking the water, restaurants, luxury hotels, and other high-priced items to draw tourists, especially well-heeled ones from the nearby metropolises.  As development happens, and people begin to buy their summer condos and vacation homes, the less-wealthy arrive to fill the jobs at the restaurants and hotels and other service industries.  Sometimes, before you know it, a municipality has been created or enhanced in places that appear to be mini-paradises.

You've heard of many of these places.  South Padre Island, Texas.  Galveston, Texas.  Atlantic City, New Jersey.  In a few weeks, I'll be heading to Sarasota, Florida where part of the city consists of development along Siesta and Longboat Keys.  Tourists flock to these places for the mix of sun, sand, water and amenities and wealthier people buy houses along the water to enjoy the boating and to have a home-away-from-home.  I'm not suggesting that these places are going to go away...yet...

In 1900 the city of Galveston had one of the largest ports in the country which competed in importance with New York and New Orleans.  A city of 37,000 people had grown on this narrow spit of sand when the storm known as the Great Hurricane of 1900 hit.  Years of surviving other storms had convinced residents that they would never need fear any storms, and they had resisted building a proposed seawall to protect the city.  Galveston Island, only 8 and 1/2 feet high at its maximum, was completely inundated by an estimated 17 foot storm surge which tore buildings from their foundations and washed them into Galveston Bay behind.  Anywhere from 6,000 to 12,000 people died as a direct result from the storm, either from the storm itself or being buried for days under wreckage.  As a result, the glory days of Galveston passed, and though remnants of it are left, it has never regained its lost glory.

We may still ask the question, as people still clean up from our modern-day Hurricane Sandy, only a week or so distant in the past as I write this post, which ripped through the barrier-island city of Ocean City and caused widespread flooding and damage.  Why do we develop barrier islands?  After all, these places when hit sustain millions and billions of dollars in damages.  The resulting effects take their toll on all of us.  Insurance rates rise as claims are filed.  Taxes go to emergency relief and other programs that create stresses on federal, state and local governments.  People do not help themselves, refusing evacuation orders and then flooding hospitals with injuries that places stresses on health care.  Disease outbreaks are always a potential problem in the aftermath of hurricanes.  The latest report I've heard from Hurricane Sandy is the fear that unscrupulous people will refurbish hurricane-damaged vehicles and flood the used car market without revealing that they are storm-damaged cars.

I remember after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans (not on a barrier island but dependent on natural features such as the extensive, and disappearing, system of bayous and wetlands to blunt hurricanes as they approach), many people in the U.S. asked why should the the country continue to provide funding and relief to a place that exists below sea level and is likely to be hit by hurricanes.  Notwithstanding that New Orleans is one of our oldest and most historically significant cities, and that many people who live there have known no other place in their lives - it is their home - I think it is a fair question.  But if we are willing to ask that question, we should also be willing to ask the question of barrier island development.  Why should the U.S. continue to allow development when we know that hurricanes will scour these islands clean every so often?  For that matter, we should ask the question whenever there is development in areas that are subject to natural disaster.  Why should we allow farming and towns in known floodplains?  Should we keep allowing development in Tornado Alley when we know that tornadoes cause widespread damage there?  Why should we allow cities to be built along active fault lines that will occasionally rupture and cause widespread devastation?  Why should development occur in the shadows of volcanoes that will eventually erupt?

If we are willing to understand that along with benefits there will occasionally be costs in lives and property, as well as more diffuse costs in services and health, and we are willing to accept these costs, then we should build away.  But we should be aware that there will be costs, as nature every so often tragically reminds us.

Musical Interlude

In the 1960s, Tom Rush recorded Wasn't That a Mighty Storm, an old spiritual that may be about the Great Hurricane of 1900 that hit Galveston.  The song could easily apply to wherever hurricanes hit barrier islands. The footage of the destruction of Galveston in the accompanying video was filmed by none other than Thomas Edison.

If you want to know more about Ocean City

Maryland Coast Dispatch (newspaper)
Ocean City Chamber of Commerce
Ocean City Convention and Visitors Bureau
Town of Ocean City
Wikipedia: Ocean City

Next up: Crisfield, Maryland

Blue Highways: Somewhere on the Delaware Shore

Unfolding the Map

As William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) eats breakfast under a pair of two silent watchtowers from the World War II era, I will devote this post to the rapidly disappearing living history of World War II.  It's a little late for Veterans Day, but I hope it helps honor this important generation who didn't wish for a worldwide conflict to be thrust upon them, but answered the call with humility and courage all the same.  To see where these relics of the war are located, take aim and target the map.  (Note: I guessed at the site based on the fact that LHM wrote that he was "south" of Rehoboth Beach and there are two towers within site.  However, there is another likely site north of Rehoboth Beach where two towers sit in sand near the water and each other.)

Book Quote

"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?"

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 13

One of the World War II observation towers in Dewey Beach, Delaware. Photo by "royal19" and housed at Flickr under a Creative Commons license. Click on photo to go to host page.Somewhere on the Delaware Shore

We are just a few days past Veterans Day as I write this post, and the quote above is quite timely.  Since my father and uncles served in the military (my father was in the Army and stationed at Saipan), I have always found the World War II era to be one of the most interesting to study.  When I was in grammar school, my friends and I always drew "war pictures" complete with planes screaming down on soldiers and buildings, or fighting each other in the sky, and heroic men charging with guns blazing into battle against the Germans or the Japanese.  Given that we were in school at the tail end and just after the Vietnam War, we hardly ever considered that war as a subject for our artwork.  It was always World War II.  We supplemented our knowledge of World War II from the myriads of movies that were on television on lazy weekend Saturdays.  I think that my preteen years were spent mostly watching World War II movies or football games.

Yet as I think about it, LHM is right.  As a country, we have extensively memorialized other great wars, such as the Revolutionary War which freed the United States from Britain, and the Civil War, which reunited a fractured country (and the wounds of which we are still healing).  But the great wars of the last century - World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War - do not get much in the way of physical memorials.  In many towns across America, you might find a pillar memorializing the men from the town or region that fought in World Wars I and II.  Sometimes they have been kept up, and sometimes they are woefully neglected, sitting unobserved in plain sight.  There are monuments to World War II, including an impressive one in Washington DC, and it has been celebrated in cinema and television.  The Vietnam War has a wonderful memorial, but being in Washington DC it is not accessible to most people.  But as we move farther away from World War II, a war which might have saved democracy and civilization itself, and as its veterans pass away into history we are beginning to suffer amnesia.  We forget how a country prone to isolationism shook itself and took up the mantle of defender of democracy and in the process became a superpower.

Why do we forget?  Perhaps it's because the 20th century wars were mostly fought in foreign lands, and therefore the United States does not bear the scars of those wars on its own turf like the great battles of the Civil War and Revolutionary War.  Perhaps it's because we live in our version of a modern world, where history seems to take a back seat to technology and young people are not interested anymore in the exploits of their grandfathers.  Perhaps it's because we've turned Hitler and the Nazi movement into a comic caricature, especially on movies and television, that trivializes the horrific dangers the world faced if he had triumphed.  Perhaps it's because we didn't have any battles on American soil.  Maybe it's because we won the war which ameliorated, somewhat, the pain and anguish faced by those who lost family members and loved ones in the struggle.  And perhaps it's because as a society, we have not done as much as we can to keep this history alive.

Every once in a while, something comes along to jar our collective memories.  Books like Band of Brothers or The Greatest Generation.  Movies like Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List.  The death of a Navajo code talker or a Bataan Death March survivor.  The discovery of unexploded ordnance in Europe in a river or at a construction site.  Certainly, not everyone was a hero in World War II.  Most of the soldiers fighting that war just did their jobs.  Many died, many more did not.  We celebrate the extraordinary exploits of a few, and honor the sacrifice and the commitment of the many regardless of whether they singlehandedly took out a platoon of Germans or an entrenched gun emplacement on Iwo Jima, or simply cooked (like my father) in a mess tent on a barren rock in the middle of the Pacific.

I remember thrilling to stories that my father told me about B-29s taking off from Saipan laden with bombs, sinking at the dropoff at the end of the runway toward the ocean.  He described the breathless seconds before the planes climbed back up and lumbered toward Japan, and how occasionally an overloaded one would fail to gain altitude and splash into the bay.  I remember him telling me about a group of Japanese soldiers, after the war ended, getting drunk in a cave where they were holed up. The next day, dirty, hungry and hung over, they marched into the American camp to surrender.  I remember his description of a under a parachute.  My wife's father, who served in the Navy on a minesweeper, has told stories of braving Japanese island guns to clear the waters of mines before invasions, and being in the sites of a Japanese kamikaze.  Both of these men were reluctant to bring up these stories, not wanting to boast and simply, humbly, considering it just something that they had to do.

We hear these stories because we ask about them.  How many stories are still unheard?

Yet a spirit of remembrance is coming alive as that generation dies. In New Orleans, the National World War II Museum was dedicated a few years ago.  It is a magnificent repository of memories and stories and a testament to the history and motivations behind the war.  Compared to that memorial, the unmarked lookout towers along the Delaware shore, an important part of the past effort to hold vigilance against our enemies in World War II, seem unimportant.  Yet they are part of an important collective history.  Thankfully, since LHM ate breakfast in their shadows, a movement has begun to save the Delaware lookout towers.  One of the towers, Tower 3 in Dewey Beach behind the spot where LHM ate his breakfast, is the subject of a campaign for renovation.  The plans call for a visitor center and a museum that will honor veterans of World War II.  As our World War II veterans march off, platoon by platoon, to their rest, perhaps we will realize what we've lost and creatively and respectfully honor them as they deserve.

Musical Interlude

One of the biggest selling songs during World War II, Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition by Kay Kyser and his Orchestra jarred me when I first heard it.  It seems uber-patriotic but, when I think about what the troops needed while deployed on ships, in tanks, in planes, and on the ground during World War II, I think that it probably gave them quite a lift to their spirits and helped them believe that even in the darkest days, they would eventually prevail.

If you want to know more about the Delaware shore

Beach-Net.com: Delaware Beaches
Delaware Tourism: Delaware Beaches
Newsday: The Delaware Shore
Wikipedia: Delaware Beaches

Next up:  Ocean City, Maryland

Blue Highways: Dover, Delaware

Unfolding the Map

When William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) relates the story of the Chief Justice's ghost on the Dover village green, it causes me to ponder a bit on the sometimes thin separation of our world from that of the dead.  Should you want to see where Dover is located, say a little prayer for those who have passed on and see the map.

Book Quote

"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."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 13

Downtown Dover, Delaware. Photo by Tim Kiser and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Dover, Delaware

Recently, here in Albuquerque, we celebrated Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead.  A day that we in European traditions have turned into a celebration of spooks and ghouls, of treats and tricks, and of costumes and candy is now mostly celebrated by little kids on parade at dusk while their parents keep a watchful eye on them.  Halloween is a sanitized holiday, the original purpose of which was to highlight the rending of the veil between our world and the spirit world, but  has been lost in commercialization and the bottom line of candy sales. 

The origins of Halloween are therefore obscured.  Perhaps an amalgamation of different Roman and pagan holidays, the day was usually marked as the end of the harvest and also, according to Celtic traditions, when the door to the Otherworld opened and spirits and sprites could join us here in ours.  Later, after Christian influences on the holiday, children went around to ask for cakes and other treats to offer as prayers to lost souls.  Of course, there are only echoes of that left in our Halloween, where it's all about the candy gained and consumed.

But the Hispanic cultural tradition has kept a bit of the original intent of the day alive.  In Albuquerque, families take time to come together in feasts.  They gather together to spruce up the gravesites of their families and leave fresh flowers and other mementos.  Ofrendas, or altars, dedicated to the memories of friends and loved ones are constructed in homes and adorned with food and mementos important to the person or persons being commemorated.  The ofrendas are often garlanded with marigolds, which are believed to attract souls to the altar where they may consume the spiritual essence of the food left as offerings and hear their living relatives talk about them.

The symbols of the day are calaveras, or skulls.  These are fashioned out of sugar and decorated in fancy and floral patterns and used to decorate for the holiday.  Catrinas are also brought out.  These carved figures usually depict a skeleton lady who represents someone from a higher class, a reminder that while riches may separate us on this earth, there is no difference between us when it comes to death.  We will all live our lives and die, and be reduced to the bare elements of what we are.  Skin and flesh, then bone, then dust.

My wife and I, after years of attending, had an opportunity to participate in the Marigold Parade, which over the past few years has become an Albuquerque tradition.  The parade features individuals and groups, dressed up with faces painted like calaveras, marching with grim faces (because death is grim) in a macabre procession that is at once somber and at the same time joyous.  The parade not only celebrates the thin veil between life and death, but also the follies of the living.  This year, small makeshift floats lampooning the 1% vs. the 99%, and other national and local politics, were mixed in with floats (usually the decorated beds of pickup trucks) remembering people who have passed on.  Because it is Albuquerque, a center of "lowrider" culture, the end of the parade featured lowriders, some equipped with hydraulics, filled with skeletal drivers and passengers in a strange, motorized death procession.

Like my feelings about unexplained phenomena, which I've written about in this forum in the past, I've always wanted to be able to believe in spirits and ghosts.  As a scientist, I am taught only to believe in what I've been able to observe, and to even question that.  On that score, I have never observed a ghost.  I've tried - I've visited supposed haunted places, including dragging my wife on our anniversary up to a haunted hotel, the St. James, in Cimarron, New Mexico on our anniversary weekend.  The strange smell of cigar smoke in our hotel room that was unaccounted for wasn't enough to convince me (though the always accommodating clerk told me that I was probably smelling the ghostly poker game in the card room around the corner).  Like most people, I wonder what happens when we die, and if our spirits and essences just disappear into the universe, or whether there is something beyond this life that we can look forward to, as many religions promise us.

But on the other hand, the thought of restless spirits roaming around, never finding a place of peace, is also quite disturbing.  If there are ghosts tied, by some unfulfilled longing or unfinished business, to a place or location where their sole purpose is to haunt until the end of time, then their existence seems sad to me.  They can't move on, and they are trapped in a kind of loop.  They are never able to leave that place and therefore, they never find the peace they desperately crave.  Isn't death supposed to be an eternity of peace after a lifetime of toil on this earth?

In a similar train of thought, my wife just reminded me of an interesting concept.  We read a short story once about a waiting room where souls of dead people are trapped as long as their names are spoken on earth.  In this vision, the people who are unknown are able to truly pass on because they are forgotten.  Those that seek fame and fortune, through vanity or other reasons, are those that remain in the waiting room purgatory.  If we are continually tied to this earth by how we are remembered, then maybe we aren't doing the dead a favor at all.  Maybe we, who must comfort ourselves and deal with our grief of those departed, actually are complicit in their inability to achieve rest.  What if they resent us for this?  What if they just wish that we would forget them so that we can move on, and in the process let them go where they need to be?

That's why, out of all the traditions, I like New Orleans' tradition around death the best.  Steeped in Christianity, it still maintains some of the non-Christian elements that make it special.  The deceased are mourned for a period, usually the first part of a jazz funeral.  Once the coffin is blessed however, a huge party breaks out.  The dead are "going home."  We have mourned, now we can be happy for them.  They've left the toils and cares of this world behind.  If anything, the dead should be grieving for us poor souls left on this hard rock to complete our own journeys.  They've finished theirs.

Musical Interlude 

My wife and I do a global music radio show on KUNM, and we did a show based on the Day of the Dead.  What follows is a mix of over 30 songs that are around the theme of life and death.  All you have to do is click on it and play.  Yes, that's me and my wife, Megan Kamerick, in the picture.  Enjoy!

Death and Life from mhessnm on 8tracks Radio.

If you want to know more about Dover

City of Dover
Delaware State University
Dover Post (newspaper)
Downtown Dover
Kent County and Greater Dover Convention and Visitors Bureau
Wikipedia: Dover

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