Blue Highways: Bellevue, Maryland

Unfolding the Map

Another ferry crossing, this time from Oxford to Bellevue, Maryland.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) mentions that this ferry is the oldest operating ferry in the U.S., but he doesn't mention a very interesting part of its early history: women owner-operators ran the ferry in some of its earliest times.  To see where this historic ferry is located, go to the map.  At right is a leaf of the white oak, the Maryland state tree.

Book Quote

"I took the Tred Avon ferry, at three centuries the oldest operating cable-free ferry in the United States, to Bellevue and drove out the double-fingered peninsula toward Tilghman Island."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 15

The Tred Avon ferry, also known as the Oxford-Bellevue Ferry, near Oxford, Maryland. Photo by Acroterion and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Bellevue, Maryland

I was struck first by the description "the oldest operating cable-free ferry in the United States."  While that might not seem remarkable, you must remember that in these days of powerful diesel engines, we rarely think about how things worked before.  Let me give you a little perspective.  The Tred Avon Ferry, also known as the Oxford-Bellevue ferry, was first started in 1683, well before motors were invented for boat travel.

The first Tred Avon ferry, according to their website, was a scow and it was driven by the side-to-side sweep of a large oar attached to the back of the boat.  Such boats were very difficult to operate because you had to find a man that was skilled in steering yet strong enough to sweep the oar to move the boat.  Such men were hard to find.  A sail could help when the wind was up, but given that the ferry had regular schedules one couldn't count on the wind being right all the time.  However, the service was essential because without crossing by ferry, the alternative was a 25-mile detour which, in the days of horses and carriages, make a day or two difference.  Even in our age of fast-moving autos, the ferry cuts about 30 minutes off of a trip.

The ferry was, and has always been, a subsidized service of Talbot County, Maryland.  The first operator of the ferry, a Richard Royston, received 2500 pounds of tobacco a year in exchange for operating the ferry service.  He later turned out to be a forger who was sentenced to be publicly whipped, and after his death at sea he was formally condemned in the Maryland Assembly as a "notoriously scandalous" man.  Later operators of the ferry also received compensation, with the payment of tobacco eventually turning into monetary subsidization.

The ferry has made strides since those days.  Sails and scupper oars were replaced by engines, and boats went from scows to types that could carry cars and people.  But what's really fascinating about this ferry is not it's establishment or the type of boats it has used.  It's the people who have operated it.  The names and dates that jump out to me as I read through its history are the following:

1690s - Amy Jensen

early 1700s - Judith Bennett

1737 - Catherine Bennett

1750s - Elizabeth Skinner

I think it's obvious why these names captured my attention, but I'll belabor the point.  In a time where women, at least officially, were considered to be essential to the home, too inferior and delicate to trouble themselves about politics and business, and were denied the right to formally and officially participate in the political process, we find that four women owned and operated an essential service in Maryland.

At second glance, this might not be as amazing as it appears.  The fact of the matter is that the colonies at this time were mostly wilderness, and the people who lived there true pioneers.  Regardless of what the official status of women might be in such places, in reality women had to be ready to do whatever was expected of men, and often a lot more.  They not only had to be able to keep house and raise children, but also be ready to take on the role of a man especially if he became laid up or if he died.  Women on the frontier belied the notion that women were frail things, too delicate to overexert themselves about the troubles of the world.  Those notions were born in the salons of men of culture and power, supported by religious interpretation led by males in religious heirarchy, and perpetuated in the populace.

When women have been thrust into situations where they have been allowed to use their ingenuity and strength, they easily keep up with men and often exceed them. When women have been given the opportunity to challenge themselves, they rise to it.  In the recent elections in the United States, the role of women in society continued to be debated, with some arguing that women have lost their purpose as a part of a larger war on men and should focus on a more limited role.  There was continued debate about choices about occupations and personal decisions that women should be allowed in society.  Data show that women are still underpaid compared to men for performing similar roles.  Despite that they are just greater than 50% of the population, they continue to be underrepresented in legal, scientific and technical professions, business leadership and in politics.  While nobody in the United States questions whether women can meet the challenges and problems of the world anymore, there has still been a backlash against women going outside of "traditional roles" even though it is often necessary and required if families are to survive in today's world.  And in some other parts of the world, tradition has locked women into a mediaeval conception of what they are capable of, and what they are allowed to do.

Yet if we look at history, we can see that regardless of the restrictions on women, events and situations have empowered some remarkable women representing all classes of society.  Women stand out as leaders in history not only because they went against the norm, but also because they did amazing things.  How many more remarkable women have escaped our awareness because history didn't record their exploits?

That is why these names, obscured to me until reading about the interesting history of the Tred Avon ferry, are so significant.  They stand in stark contrast to prevailing notions of the time, such as that women are not truly capable of running a business.  Really, there are two things that stand behind these notions and suspicions: that women aren't to be trusted and that men will lose their favored place in society.  And yet, when we really look at history, and observe the actions of our foremothers, our wives, our sisters and our daughters, we all know that there is no truth behind those notions.  The female owners and operators of small frontier ferry are another small but important proof added to the record of the accomplishments and abilities of remarkable women.  Today, a quick look at the ferry's website reveals that one of the captains of the ferry, and a co-owner, is a woman named Judy Bixler.  She continues the tradition of the unique contributions that women have made to the oldest American ferry service.

For myself, I look forward to the day when the idea of "unique," "amazing" and "remarkable" women ceases to be so surprising.

Musical Interlude

I was trying to find a suitable song to fit the post.  I ended up with this surprise discovery of Celebrate Woman by the 2beat Band.  I doubly like the song because I can use it on the Global Music Show that my wife and I do on our local radio station.

If you want to know more about Bellevue

Annapolis Landscape TV on Youtube: Oxford-Bellevue Ferry
Washington Post slideshow: Oxford-Bellevue Ferry
Wikipedia: Bellevue

Next up: St. Michaels, Maryland

Blue Highways: Oxford, Maryland

Unfolding the Map

Traveling up the Chesapeake Bay with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), we hit Oxford, Maryland.  A quiet waterfront town, his description of houses and fences gives me pause to reflect on my own current foray into looking for a house.  At right is the Maryland state bird, the Baltimore oriole as seen on Wikimedia Commons.  If you want to find Oxford, there's no better place than the map.

Book Quote

"On a peninsula between the Choptank and Tred Avon rivers, I came to Oxford, a seventeenth-century village of brick sidewalks and nineteenth-century houses.  Only a few small streets branched off the main trunk, Robert Morris Street, a way of aesthetically cohesive homes and yards fenced by the Oxford picket - a slat with a design at the top that looks like an ace of clubs with a hole shot in it.  The pickets were popular, even though painting the holes could take all spring."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 15

Downtown Oxford, Maryland. Photo by Wikipedian1234 and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Oxford, Maryland

My wife and I have stopped thinking about talking about buying a house, and we have moved to talking about and then thinking about buying a house.  If that seems confusing, well, that's just the way we operate.

The quote above, with its references to a picturesque village, nineteenth-century houses and picket fences, fits with my current thoughts toward finding and making a home for ourselves.  We have been starting to move our thoughts toward what kinds of houses we would like, what neighborhoods we would like to live in, and how much house we can afford.  Do we want two bedrooms or three, 1 or two bathrooms, perhaps a garage?  How big of a yard?  Most people do this sometime in their 20s or 30s, but not me and my wife.  We're waiting until I'm almost 50 to seriously consider buying our first house.

I suppose the type of house is also on the table.  It seems that in this particular area where LHM traveled in Blue Highways, "telescope" houses were plentiful.  I had never heard of these type of houses  until reading about them in the book.  They are houses that started as small units, and then larger units were built onto the smaller ones until the houses look like the components of a telescope.  In New Orleans, had we bought there, chances are that we would have found a "shotgun" house, so named because once you entered the door, each room followed the next in a straight line back to the kitchen.  The idea was you could have fired a shotgun from the front door and the pellets would travel out the back door without hitting anything (although that doesn't make much sense because shotgun pellets spread out as they travel - a rifle house would be a better name for these houses).  We rented a shotgun house for a year when we lived in New Orleans.  Actually, it was a double shotgun because it had two shotgun apartments on each side of the house, and it could be a bit of a pain when we guests because they had to walk through our bedroom to get to the bathroom.  People buying homes in New Orleans often would fix these houses up to live in and, if they were a double shotgun, to rent out one side to pay the mortgage.

Midwestern style brick houses never seem to be out of style anywhere - we'd see them wherever Midwesterners came to settle outside the Midwest.  In Milwaukee, smack dab in the Midwest, these houses were always wonders to me.  Even the ones that looked like they had the most age on the outside often had elaborate and beautiful woodwork inside.  They were always at least two stories, and sometimes three.  Many of our friends who bought houses had these style of houses, usually fixer-uppers that were bought cheap and became lifelong projects.

Out in Northern California, the ranch house reigned supreme, at least in the rural areas where I grew up.  These tended to sprawl out.  My mom's house, for example, has a large living room with two small bedrooms off one side and a kitchen off the other.  A long hallway travels laterally from the living room, past a multipurpose room and a bathroom to another medium-sized bedroom and another small bathroom adjacent to the first.  When I grew up, we added a room and therefore augmented the space in the house, though it is strange as the room is aesthetically separate from the rest of the house, even though it is connected by two doors, simply because it sits lower than the rest of the building.

In Albuquerque, the Southwestern style of house predominates.  Many houses, modeled after the dwellings in Native American pueblos, have a pueblo-style to them.  The most sought-after are adobe houses.  Built of bricks made of mud and straw, they are plastered with additional mud and are therefore reddish-brown, almost as if they have sprung from the earth itself.  They are perfect for desert living, as they tend to stay cool in the hot summers but trap heat from the sun in the winter.  From above they look rectangular, but from street level their corners are softened and rounded and they are often surrounded by adobe walls.  I find them very pleasant and relaxing, especially with a nice xeriscaped garden in front and in back.  Of course, other styles of housing are available, including faux-adobes which are made with modern materials but are fashioned to look like adobe houses.  That's the kind of house we rent currently.

So, there are a lot of things for us to consider, including price.  I was surprised to find that even with my salary alone, we could afford a lot more house than I had expected.  Now it's just up to us to decide, take a look at a few things, and eventually make a decision on one we like and for which we are willing to make an offer.

That's scarier than it sounds.  Doing so means that we will be responsible for repairs and upgrades.  We will have to make decisions about remodeling should any come up.  It will be the biggest investment of money we will ever make.  It will anchor us in a way that we've never been anchored before.

But, as I think about it, I really want to create and nurture a garden.  I want a place to display arts picked up around the world in the way I want to display them.  I want a room where I can put our beautiful Turkish carpet.  And I want to grow up, to be an adult, and feel a sense of belonging and home that I haven't felt for a long time.  And even though I probably won't have a picket fence, a low adobe wall would be a nice touch if we can find it.

Musical Interlude

I couldn't find a song that I knew that fit this post, so figured I put on my discovery of The Fall's My New Home.

If you want to know more about Oxford

Baydreaming.com: Oxford
The Oxford Museum
Town of Oxford
Wikipedia: Oxford

Next up:  Bellevue, Maryland

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