by

David T. Wilson

While walking in the Bay, my daughter said that her boss had asked what there was exciting to do at our beach house. Exciting? As she then said, it’s hard for people to understand the Smith Beach experience. Today so many of us are adrenaline junkies. We need bigger thrills, more excitement, greater stimulation. Vacation means searching for our annual fix.

The Smith Beach experience certainly is not that. Bucolic. With all that encompasses -- countrified, agrarian, rustic, provincial, homey. The nearest town is Eastville, the Northampton County seat. The County Courthouse has the oldest continuous records of any courthouse in United States. The Clerk will be happy to show them to you. The first one is a land transfer where an Indian drew an eagle as his signature. There’s also a Debtors Prison. She has the key to that, too, and will let you borrow it to go in. There’s the new post office just up the road. Well, it’s actually about 10 years old, but here, that’s new. The shopping area of Eastville? Well, there is a Shore Stop gas station/convenience store out on the Highway. Eastville Hardware is out of town on Business Rt. 13, and Gray’s Furniture is across the street . . . when it is open. That’s Eastville.

The biggest "city" is Cape Charles. Cape Charles does have a business area. It’s about two blocks long. How wide? Two blocks long. Used to have a Peebles department store, but it closed years ago. There was a movie theater, but it closed years ago. There is a homosexual gentrification going on, so there are some little art shops, special bakeries, and cutesy shops opening. The down home farmers are rather bemused by the whole thing. The ferry from Norfolk used to come in here, but that ended years ago. There is a country club in town. Well, it calls itself a country club. Actually it is a cow pasture golf course. Nine holes with two sets of tees at each hole so you can play 18. Beautiful, huge, old red brick homes face out to The Bay across the public beach, and there are several square blocks of gentrified and not-so nice homes throughout. The town water tower is painted to look like a lighthouse.

The exciting things to do at Smith Beach? Well, there used to be a drive-in movie up the road, but it closed years ago.

Cheriton is the little town between Eastville and Cape Charles. Paul’s used to be the combination drugstore/restaurant/soda fountain/bus stop. Used to be you’d sit at the fountain, chatting, and watch the occasional car go by. When, all of a sudden, a string of twenty cars would go by you would know that the ferry from Norfolk had docked at Kiptopeake. That was excitement! Paul’s restaurant had wonderful homemade pies. If you ever asked for the recipe . . . well, the baker was out at that time. No matter what the time. She was darned if she was going to give away her recipe.

Right next door to Paul’s was Rolley’s (pronounced Raw-ley’s). That was the general store. Some few groceries, seeds, tools, dust, flypaper, tin chimney fittings, and so forth. Old Mr. Rolley would usually be there, sitting around with a bunch of friends, chewing the fat. "Hop" Hopkins used to have a Chevy dealership in town, but that closed years ago. When Rt. 13 bypassed the town with its new four-lane highway, Cheriton got really quiet.

A block south of Paul’s you turn east between the Baptist and Methodist churches. Follow this road for just a few miles to Oyster. It’s a shame. Oyster is still quaint, but it is falling apart more and more. There is a nice little fishing harbor, but there aren’t that many fishing boats left. With its old wooden boats, some beached hulks, and its tiny one-room post office Oyster is still picturesque. But there used to be more fish packing sheds, and a gray weathered deserted two-story hotel that overlooked the salt flats toward the ocean. Not far from the old hotel was a high grassy sandbar called Horse Island. Forty years ago we used to wait until low tide and wade out to Horse Island. It had an old Indian burial ground on it, and we could find flint arrowheads if we walked long enough with our eyes to the ground.

There’s a boat ramp across the harbor from the town. That’s one place to put in if you are going to fish on seaside. It’s a long way out, weaving through the grass and salt flats. A little more than one-half way out are the pilings and brick chimneys of a substantial old hotel. Used to be a popular venue for wealthy folks from "up north" to come hunting and fishing. It closed and burned down over fifty years ago.

Further out, on Smith Island, is the old Coast Guard station. Three stories, with a lookout cupola on the top, wooden clapboard which once was painted white. There’s an empty boathouse, with doors ajar, and rails still running down to the little lagoon. The windows have broken, either from vandalism of man or vandalism of the ever-present weather. Smith Island is just north of Wreck Island. I wonder if that means anything. The Smith Island Coast Guard Station closed years ago. Long after they named it Wreck Island. They’ve put the station house on a barge and moved it to Oyster.

Route 13, down the center of the Eastern Shore, is four-lane divided, now. There are still a number of accidents, each year by locals who have trouble coping with the speed of a real highway. Used to be Rt. 13 was three lanes. One lane each direction and a suicide lane in the center for whomever had the courage (or frustration level) to pass. It was real exciting to pull out to pass and find someone coming the other way who had the same idea.

To get to Smith Beach you turn west off of old (business) Rt. 13 just south of Eastville, right next to the combination grocery/laundromat where the county keeps the community dumpsters. It was B&B Market for a long time, but since Jack Burroughs and his wife sold it, it’s now euphemistically called the Eastville Supermarket. The road down from old 13 used to be called "The Deep Road," because of the high hardwood trees growing close on either side of the road for the first mile or so. Then it opens up to some fields. The one on the right, usually planted for tomatoes, is irrigated from below! It has pipes running underground from a pumped well on the corner. The only one around.

Did you notice that everyone passing seems to wave? Do they know you? No, that’s just the way it is out here. Everyone is friendly. Everyone waves. You’re in a different world . . . the Eastern Shore.

Keep going until the road sort of forks, and the main road bends to the left. You want to go right, but if you had taken the left road you would go by the field where the hotel used to be. There was a three-story green-and-white wooden hotel right there on Wilkins Beach, named (surprise!) the Wilkins Beach Hotel. It closed years ago. In fact, it disappeared over thirty years ago. There is now a VORTAC on the site where the hotel used to be. That’s an airplane directional beacon for the Norfolk airport, across the Bay. We don’t need one over here. The closest airport, for general aviation, is over an hour up the road. Most people who fly just use a local field. Not airfield. Field. But more about that later.

If you turn at the end of the field just after the VORTAC you can drive all the way to the Bay. Park there, climb down the bank to the beach, turn south, and you can walk for over a mile without seeing people nor houses. You’ve got to pick your way over acres of driftwood, but the photo opportunities are magnificent.

Bay on the right, pinewoods and sand dunes on the left. Climb up over the lower dunes and you sometimes find a little brackish pond. Beautiful.

But we took the right fork, Smith Beach Road. Follow it down about one-half mile, and it does a 90-degree bend to the right. You can see the Bay through a gap in the trees right in front of you. Smith Beach is a mile long strip of "civilization" on the Bay. It has cottages all of the way down on the Bay side, and, now, most of the way on the land side of the road. The cottages are mostly just summer places. Used to be that it was local farmers who owned them, and would occasionally rent them to vacationers. There were only a few that were occupied year-round. Come to think of it, there still are only a few that see winter use. But now there are owners from a lot of different places. I wonder how they ever heard of Smith Beach.

The homeowners are just that -- home-owners. The property of Smith Beach is still owned by Tom Smith. Tom must be older than dirt, now. I can remember him, forty-five years ago, driving his white pickup truck up and down the road. It’s a different truck, but there he is, every day, driving up and down Smith Beach Road. Tom has a big farmhouse down a lane from Smith Beach Road. He’s a bachelor. He and his bachelor brother used to live together in the big house. They say that one day they had a big argument and in anger his brother went out, climbed into his little airplane parked in a back field, and took off. Tom, still being angry also, hooked the disc harrow up to his tractor and plowed the field so that his brother couldn’t land there again.

That’s the way it is at Smith Beach.

The cottages are an interesting amalgam. "The Preacher’s Cottage," which our friends used to rent, had two bedrooms and a tin roof. A tiny bathroom, which for years didn’t have a window. Finally Clarence, the ancient local plumber who looked after the cottage for the preacher, cut a window in the outside wall. He make a screened wood-slat louvered "window", and it was done. We found, during a powerful rainstorm, that the wooden louvers weren’t sufficient, and had to tack plastic over it as the wind and rain were whistling through.

The linoleum on the floor wasn’t nailed or glued down. We found that out when we were brushed by the winds of a hurricane. Our poor English Setter, Lassie, truly freaked out when the winds blew and the floor started rising and falling. And the pump! All of the cottages are on wells, and in "The Preacher’s Cottage" when the pump out back would come on the whole place would vibrate. It was fun.

I remember one year we came in from fishing and left a basket with some hard crabs in it outside while we cleaned up and ate dinner. There was a stray cat around, and it kept sniffing around the crabs. Suddenly we heard a rowwwrrrrr that raised the hair on the back of your neck as the cat found out what the crabs had for defense. The crab must have grabbed hold and hung on because we could hear the cat race around the outside of the cottage, then slam into one corner, apparently knocking the crab off.

The first cottage we rented was down at the other end of the road. There was a hill, then a little curve back in the beach, and that’s where we were. The way the cottage was situated, we got almost no breeze, and this was in the years before air conditioning. Actually, since these cottages were basically "weekenders," it was before a lot of stuff. Like hot water heaters. In this cottage we had solar hot water. There was a hot water tank on the roof, and the sun was supposed to heat the hot water. It probably would have worked fine, except that the tank was painted white to reflect the sun’s heat, rather than black to absorb it. Cold showers for two weeks. Well, at least we did have indoor plumbing.

Another cottage used to be the train depot up in Weirwood. It was being abandoned, so some enterprising person popped it onto a flatbed and trucked it down to the beach. Then they fixed it up into a nice weekender. Still has the "Weirwood" station sign on the side.

Then there’s the couple of long cottages on the land-side of the road. Long with long screened-in porches. They used to be packing sheds . . . sliding doors and all. Trucked them down to the Beach, knocked together some walls, and PRESTO! Summer homes.

Did you notice that big white one about six up from the corner on the Bayside? That was the second floor apartment over a country store. They were going to tear the whole thing down, so they knocked out everything below, dropped the top floor down on a flatbed, and hauled it on down to the Beach.

Then there’s the place where Hefty Heath used to live. Good old Hefty. He used to come up and spend the summer. Then one year, he came up and stayed. Hefty put a trailer across from Bob and Retha’s little summer trailer, and moved in. Over the years he added on a winterized front porch and a big master bedroom in the back. He joked once about how the front porch was heated by electric, he had an oil heater in the main trailer and the big master bedroom had gas heat. He was ready whatever might come. He added a nice little screened-in porch as a vestibule. One day a Hefty mentioned his trailer to a visitor sitting in his home. "You’ve got a trailer, too?" the visitor asked. Hefty had added on so much to the basic trailer that you didn’t even know it was there any longer.

Across the street from Hefty some folks wanted to add a big screened-in porch to their home, but there was a big tree growing right where the porch would be. So they built around the tree, and have it growing right up through the porch ceiling.

Down at this end of the road is The Gulf. That’s a saltwater creek that runs from the Bay all the way up close to Eastville. It’s not navigable all that way, and for the part that is, it’s only at high tide. We used to water-ski back in The Gulf when I was a kid. We had a shallow draft boat, and kept it up on a plane. You didn’t want to fall, though. The bottom was covered with oyster shells which would cut you up pretty well.

We used to crab in The Gulf. Out in The Bay, too. No chicken neckin’ or pots. Just put a bushel basket in an inner tube and tie it to float behind you as you walk the shallows with a dip net. Used to be you could dip up maybe a half bushel of Jimmies. Always throw the Sukes back so they can have more babies. Can’t dip crabs anymore. They just aren’t there. We put out two pots in the channel out front of the house, but some summers it’s just a waste of good chicken backs.

Chris and Rachel were scandalized the other day. There were 32 other people on the beach within eyesight!

And on the weekends there are sometimes two jet skis! Last night, for the first time in memory, a car drove by with its radio turned high enough to be able to "feel" the bass inside. That’s not the Smith Beach Experience. Today is Monday, a beautiful sunny day, and there are NO people on the beach! The call of the gulls, the whistling of the breeze, and an occasional car driving by. THAT is the Smith Beach Experience. The predominant sound is the song of mockingbirds. Or the angry cry of the mockingbird in its attack mode as it dive bombs the dog. And, too, there is the call of the bobwhite quail as she whistles to keep her kids together. This morning, as they drove out to buy a newspaper, mom and a covey of little babies ran across the road in front of Chris and Rachel. That is The Smith Beach Experience.

Another part of it is the fact that the phone man just came to fix the telephone. He was due yesterday. We stuck around from 0800 to 1900 hours, and he came at 1130 today. That is definitely The Smith Beach Experience. Actually, that’s pretty prompt.

The work ethic at Smith Beach is interesting. Chris Wilson builds a lot of the beach steps, decks, and seawalls. He does a very good job. But he’s got a cell phone, and if he gets the call that fish are running, he’s gone. He makes no bones about it. He has his priorities! Chris was building a really nice deck/stairs next door when he got the call. Finally, about dark, I went over, picked up his power tools, and moved them to the porch. Not that they’d get stolen. Didn’t want the heavy dew to get them. But Chris does really nice work. When he built our stairs, knowing that I’m crippled and my parents were old, he put each step an inch or two closer together. He always sands off the sharp edges, too. He finally gets it done, and when he does it’s a work of art, not just construction. When it is finally done. It helps if you happen to be a fellow Mason. You just have to understand the Smith Beach timetable.

Food is another part of The Smith Beach Experience. Fresh fish, either dropped off by friends or caught yourself; fresh vegetables, either bought from roadside stands or picked from the fields yourself. You can still come home from church on a Sunday to find a paper sack of tomatoes or sweet corn sitting by the door. Or Charlie might drop by with a basket of clams he just raked up. Or Tim might drop by on his way back from fishing with a mess of croaker or weakfish. The Smith Beach Experience.

And as for the Shore experience, talk about food! Watch in the local weekly newspaper (or, if you are high-tech, on Billy Barton’s e-mail newsletter) for church suppers. You want to talk about good eating? Everyone is welcome, and the ladies of the church do the cooking. You just can’t go to any restaurant, even those that proclaim "home cooking," and find the succulent quality of the sweet potato biscuits, soft-shell crabs, steamed clams, oysters, fritters, fried chicken, cantaloupe and watermelon that you will find at a church dinner. And all of it that you can eat! What an experience!

Have you ever come up from the beach hot, sandy, salty, tired? Take an outdoor shower; enclosed but open on top so you can either feel the sun on your body with the water cool, or see the stars and feel cool night breezes with the water warm. Of course, you do have to watch out that the mosquitoes or horse flies don’t bite you. Especially when you are in the all-and-all in the shower. And make certain that you rinse the sand off of your feet in the bucket by each door before you go in.

This is a living document, and this is just all that has been added so far. As time goes by, and memory serves, it will continue to grow.

Remember the TV commercial about "It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature?" That really comes into play at Smith Beach. Each winter the storms seem to eat away more of The Beach and the bank out front of the house. When I was much younger I remember Clarence telling me he could recall when they farmed out as far as the second sandbar. That’s about two to three hundred yards off shore, now. They’ve tried lots of ways of trying to stop the erosion. First they put in rows of railroad ties like pilings to try to catch the sand. Started with them up against the bank stretching down to the water. They’re mostly out in the water now, with the bank eaten away behind them. One year the Mahalykas tried putting railroad tie pilings across the front of the bank and dumping broken up road concrete down behind it. Ches Wise tried it, also. Mother Nature took all of that, too. Uncle Carl dumped huge chunks of rock and concrete all over the bank in front of his cottage. Kind of worked. Down by the Vortac the government put big sand-filled bags to stop the erosion. Nope. Then they put lots of riprap, stones, on the bank in front of the Vortac to stop the erosion. Well, it stopped the erosion directly in front but the winter waves cut in on either side and made it into a peninsula. They finally had to pick up the Vortac and move it further back from the edge. In the battle of man against nature . . . nature always wins.

I remember one summer seeing a house, down past the deserted hotel that got undercut and went from the bank to The Beach. Some day Mother Nature will prevail. Hope I’m not around by then.

It might not be exciting to people in the city, but I always enjoyed watching the birds at The Beach. When Dad would filet the fish we’d catch, he’d toss the carcasses down on the sand. It wouldn’t take long before dozens of seagulls would be circling overhead waiting for more, yelling and crying for handouts. Sometimes there would be fights on The Beach, as a bigger gull would take a chunk of fish away from a smaller tern.

The sound of the gulls. That is definitely part of the Smith Beach Experience.

There are other sounds, too. We won’t talk much about the obnoxious whine of the mosquito. But, then there was the sound of the distant horn buoys in the night. You certainly couldn’t always hear them, but sometimes, if the night was still enough, you could just hear their call way off across the water. And the sound of the wind in the trees. Especially on rainy days. And the evening calls of the bobwhites over in Tom Smith’s fields on the other side of the road. Those are all part of The Smith Beach Experience. Car horns, too. Whenever a friend would drive past, they’d honk their horn, and we’d quick crane our heads to see who it was. "There goes Charlie," or "I guess Jimmy’s headed up for the mail." All part of The Experience.

The sound of seagulls, and the sight of them swooping and soaring. And the ospreys, the sea hawks, too. I remember once Retha was sitting on the top of her stairs when a big osprey flew over and dropped a huge speckled trout right in her lap. That was when Dad was going out casting lures for specks early each morning, to no avail, and here Retha just sits on the top of her steps and one drops in her lap. Had a lot of good roe in it, too. Poor Dad didn’t hear the end of that for a while.

You pretty much had to and have to make your own excitement at Smith Beach. We never had television when we rented a cottage. There used to be a drive-in movie a ways up the road . . . but it closed years ago.

Fireworks! Now that was some excitement at Smith Beach. On the way down, each year, we’d stop at T’s Corner, at the Chincoteague turn-off. Dad would buy low tax cigarettes, and we kids would buy FIREWORKS!!!!! Used to you could buy cherry bombs. And ashcans. And, later, M-80’s! For the mothers we’d also buy Roman candles and sparklers and pinwheels. But us kids were interested in DESTRUCTION. FIRE POWER. EXPLOSIVES. Walking down The Beach at low tide, one time, we found a square five-gallon gas can. It was empty, so we put it out on an exposed sandbar, dropped a cherry bomb into it, and ran. It must have still had some residue left in it because when the explosion split it open the flames were brief but spectacular!

Another time we found an old commode, upright and full of sand. We scooped out the sand on one side, put a board with sand on top of it partially over the hole, building a bunker, and dropped in a cherry bomb. Porcelain really doesn’t have much structural integrity.

Then, at night, we would put on our own Fourth of July spectaculars, with the mothers ooohing and aaaahing up on the bank. And constantly warning us to be careful and not burn ourselves. Yeah, that was another part of the Smith Beach Experience. Then they stopped selling the exploding fireworks at T’s Corner. If you knew John Bruce White you could buy them under the counter at his store, but his store’s been gone for years, now.

What do we do for excitement at Smith Beach? Well, one year someone put in a dancehall down at the end of the road near The Gulf. It didn’t last long. Closed after about a year. It’s been someone’s residence for years, now. And up at the head of the road, by B&B (well, Eastville Supermarket), there used to be a soft ice cream stand across the street. It didn’t last long. After about a year it became a residence. Now it’s a little (you can imagine how little) church. And next to it Kate opened her Cupboard. A bakery. There is nothing like a warm sticky bun fresh from the oven! Get up early in the morning and buy them for breakfast! Mmmmmm! Of course, after Kate’s Cupboard up the road in Exmore was doing well, she closed the one down here. And that was years ago. And then on the other side of the ice cream stand/home/church was a hardware store. Fishing supplies, tools, etc. It’s a home, now. The hardware store closed years ago.

Up in Eastville is the two-story Eastville Inn. Can’t have a county seat without an Inn. I remember, that was where I first ate a Slim Jim. It had a wooden screen door with a spring closer that slammed it when it closed. Remember those? I don’t remember if they ever let rooms as long as I’ve known it. There was the restaurant, but that closed years ago. Someone has been refurbishing the Inn. But that’s been going on for years, and it’s not open yet.

Across the street from the Eastville Inn was a drugstore. That was convenient, too, and lasted for a while. When it closed it was re-opened as an antique shop. I don’t know how well they did as an antique shop, but it closed years ago.

Food. It seems that little restaurants were always popping up and closing. I remember Charlie took us to one, once. It was way back off of 13. The advertised (at least by word-of-mouth) draw for that restaurant was that the proprietor would take his teeth out, pull his lower lip up over his top one, and talk funny. Well, I guess you had to be there to appreciate it. Or not, come to think of it.

With no television visiting and story telling were popular evening pastimes. Charlie always told such wonderful stories about when he was a kid. He told, once, about the time his brother was teaching him how to chop the head off a chicken for dinner. Hold the wing tips and legs with one hand, put her across the block, and CHOP! Off with her head. He grabbed her, put her across the block, and FLINCHED! Cut the tip of her beak off. "I had to go and get my gun and shoot her or we wouldn’t have eaten." Once, when we were walking around on an island in The Bay, Charlie gave me a sprig of something and told me to put it in my shoe for good luck. He said that he had, as a kid, and the next day the schoolhouse burned down.

Dad got Charlie one day, though. Charlie was making a communion table for his church, and was real proud of it. He had hand-carved the front rail of the table. It was beautiful. When he took Dad to look at it Dad turned to Charlie and said, "Charlie, how do you spell ‘REMEMBRANCE’?" Charlie had carved IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME on the front rail. Charlie started looking. The longer he looked, the more unsure of the spelling he became. Until he was really flummoxed. He hadn’t spelled it wrong. Dad never said that he had. He only asked what the proper spelling was. And, of course, once the doubt is there, it just gets worse. It was probably the best one Dad ever put over on Charlie. But I digress.

What is there exciting to do at Smith Beach? Well, with all of the water out there, one thing is definitely fishing. There are lots of fishing holes, out in front of The Beach. Back before there were Loran and GPS and depth finders for small boats, we used to find the fishing spots by triangulation. You go out until a certain duck blind is on that point of land up by Honeymoon Island, then over until that dead tree is right on the corner of the deserted hotel, and you were on Big Rock. Or was it Little Rock? Whatever. It worked real well, until someone cut down the tree by the hotel as a prank. I know who did it, but I’ll never tell. Back when they did it, people were kind of upset. Now they had to find a new way to locate the fishing holes. One year Willard Schneebly put some orange Clorox containers out to mark one of The Rocks, but they’ve been gone for years, now. So’s Schneebly, for that matter.

Once we got our courage up to go "way out" we could go fishing at The Cell. That was an old Navy de-gaussing station from WWII. Looked like an old locomotive with a coal car sitting out in the middle of The Bay. The fish used to like to gather around it to eat. Each year it seemed like another part of The Cell was missing when we’d show up for vacation. One year the smokestack was gone, and the next another big chunk was missing. Seemed to take a long time for all of it to disappear, but The Cell’s been gone for years, now.

Fishing. You ever see the bumper sticker that says A BAD DAY FISHING IS BETTER THAN A GOOD DAY AT THE OFFICE? That was really our main pastime. When we started we would rent a little five horsepower outboard motor up in Maryland, and then borrow a twenty- foot wooden scow from Ralph, up Hungars Creek. We’d all drive over to his house, then "THE MEN" would ride back in the scow, towed by Ralph, while the ladies would drive the car back to The Beach. There were no seats in the scow, it was just a workboat. Must’ve weighed a ton! When we’d all go out fishing the kids [four of us] would sit on upturned buckets or peach baskets while the adults [four of them] would sit on driftwood planks run from gunnel to gunnel. Eight people, a wooden scow the displacement of the Queen Mary, and we’d putt-putt out into The Bay with our little five horsepower motor. Then one year we bought our own twelve horsepower motor! Thought we were really something. We’d fish with poles about as flexible as broomsticks and linen fishline with the tensile strength to pull you out of the boat before it would break to allow a fish to get away. "Ultralight" fishing gear back then meant a pole the weighed less than ten pounds, with only 500-pound test line. This we called sport, but this was definitely The Smith Beach Experience.

Not exciting enough for you? One year the scow we borrowed had a hole drilled in the bottom so that Ralph could kind of swamp it out when it got too gamy. You haven’t seen the excitement when four adults and four kids are out several miles into The Bay and Big Jim kicks the plug out! Now that’s excitement!

We tried all sorts of things for bait. Clams, squid, cut up Spot. But about the best bait seemed to be peeler crabs. We’d ride up to Cheriton, then down to Cherrystone Creek where Little Haney ran a crab house. He had lots of floats with crabs in them, waiting for them to peel down to softshells which he could then pack in ice and ship to restaurants in New York City. But he’d sell us some peelers, or sometimes some papershells, and we’d be set. You could tell when they were ready to peel by a red corona in the edge of their swimming flippers. Little Haney’s gone, now. So’s Old Blind Bill who used to sit by the boat ramp in Oyster. Bill used to grade clams by feel, and sell some for bait. Bill was really interesting, but he’s been gone for years, now.

Another sound that we don’t hear anymore, and that I don’t really miss, are sonic booms. The Beach is right across The Bay from Oceana Naval Air Station and Langley Air Force Base. Used to be that the jet fighters would fly at almost rooftop level, up and down The Beach, and every now and then break the sound barrier with a window-rattling BOOOOOM! They haven’t been allowed to do that for years, now, though when a carrier is coming back in from deployment you often see pairs of fighters screaming in from seaside headed for their base on the other side of The Bay. There’s excitement for you. Well . . . it was exciting when I was a little kid.

Fishing and swimming during the week, and on Sunday we’d go up to the Cheriton Methodist Church. I don’t remember much about church, except that everyone sat in the back pews and everyone was hot. It was the first time I ever saw fans in church. Not electric fans. In the rack on the back of each pew, there with the hymnal and the King James Bible, were cardboard fans with flat wooden handles, looked kind of like tongue depressors, stapled on. On one side of the fan would be a lithograph of some colorful scene from the Bible, and on the other would be some words. Now that I think of it, they were probably Bible verses, but I never read them. Fans in church. It would be fun, watching all of the motion of the fans. Some of the ladies would be real slow and gentle with their motion, and some of the younger ones would try to get a real hurricane of wind flapping. You could pretty much tell who was asleep, too. They’d just be sitting sweating, not fanning. Then, after church, it would be dinner at Paul’s, and back to The Beach. Unless we stopped by to visit Chris and Clarence or Ralph and Irma or Wilsie or Kitty. Visiting was as much a part of the Smith Beach Experience as anything. They’re pretty much all gone, now.

I remember a story Poppa Jim told about his parents, Alvin and Mamie. I knew grandma. She lived with Poppa Jim and the family at home. Seems a stray cat showed up at their house in Sunnyside. The thing looked hungry, so they fed it [big mistake], and then Grandpa Alvin took the cat to work with him, down at the Cheriton train station. Next morning, there was the cat back for breakfast. This time Grandpa Alvin took the cat, rode several stops north with it, and left it at another depot telling the manager there what was up. The manager, who apparently had a good sense of humor, drove home to Cheriton that night with the cat in the car, and let it out near Grandpa Alvin’s. Next morning, there’s the cat waiting for breakfast! This time Grandpa gives the cat to a trainman headed north, and tells him to keep the cat until he gets to Maryland. Well, he did. And in Maryland he gave the cat to a trainman headed south, and told him to turn it loose in Cheriton. When they found the cat on the doorstep again the next morning Grandma Mamie allowed that they might as well keep it ‘cause they sure couldn’t get rid of it.

The train runs right along side of Route 13 all the way to Cape Charles. A new company bought the railroad a number of years back, intending to make it a going concern. Then they found out that the rail bed was so beat up that they couldn’t run the train over about seven miles per hour or it would jump the track. But that’s the way it is on The Eastern Shore. Life definitely runs at a different pace, and that’s one of the things that make it so special.

Smells. That is another part of The Eastern Shore and The Smith Beach Experience. No, not just the smell of frying fish or chicken [though I won’t complain about them]. I remember when I first returned to The Shore after coming home from Viet Nam. Driving across the Bridge-Tunnel the tide was out, and when we reached The Shore I could smell the rich, kind of rotten, a little gamy smell of the black mud that the low tide exposed. I smelled some things in Viet Nam that were a lot worse, and I’ve smelled expensive perfume, but that smell of Chesapeake Bay black mud, smelling of decomposing shellfish and sea grass and salt water and who-knows-what is one of the nicest aromas around.

And at night . . . there’s still the smell of honeysuckle. Oh, sure, I’ve smelled honeysuckle elsewhere. But it mixes in with all of the other smells – The Bay, new cut grass, fish, new turned earth, crabs boiling, watermelon – to be part of The Smith Beach Experience.

It’s 7:00 on a calm morning. It poured rain, yesterday, but there is sun coming from behind me as I gaze out on The Bay from my porch windows. It’s totally flat. Not even a breeze, yet, to stir the water into cat’s-paws. All the way to the horizon it’s like a mirror. You don’t see it this calm often. According to my painstakingly set tide clock, the tide is just past ebb, and my little boat, at anchor out front, is just starting to swing on her road back up the bay. The tide is so low that there’s a row of gulls standing with dry feet out on the second sandbar. Looking down toward The Gulf, there’s dry sandbar all along its mouth.

You might want to talk about Boeing 757’s or L-1011’s being big fliers, but the biggest flying thing just crossed my vision. You don’t see a lot of Great Blue Herons at Smith Beach, but the granddaddy of them all just swooshed past. Man! Talk about majestic. Now, I love the raptors … the fish hawks and red-shouldered hawks and especially the bald eagles … but that Great Blue, what Michener called "Fishing Long-Legs" in Chesapeake, was truly awesome. How he could fly so close to the top of the water, and glide for so long when there was no breeze for him to ride, is beyond me. Whew! I wish you could have sat here and seen it with me!

I also have to admit that as I am sitting here, it is humid outside as only The Eastern Shore can get. Nassawadox, where the hospital is, means "The Land Between Two Waters" in the old Indian. Well, let me tell you, when it is humid here, between Bayside and Seaside, it is really H*U*M*I*D! I feel as though I am mildewing. So, although in my reminisces I recall hot days and soggy nights, I confess that sitting here looking at The Bay … with the AC running … helps. A lot. Dad was a purist (or else feared the bills from the A&N Co-op [electric], but he wouldn’t turn on the air conditioning until the ice in the freezer was melting even with the door closed. The humidity here makes the covers of paperback books curl, and curly hair go straight! I’ll stick with the AC.

Now, I don’t want to seem ghoulish, but pain is part of The Smith Beach Experience, too. Who can forget walking barefoot across the front lawn only to find that the sand spurs have been flourishing this year? Little gray prickly pincushions created by Satan himself. And trying to pull those devilishly sharp things from your feet, you only end up with them stuck in your fingers. Or how about the sun? I remember well the time Jimmy and I walked way down the Beach, feeling the sun burning into our backs. Felt good. Until that night. Then the mothers spent the evening making strong tea, soaking rags in it, and gently laying them on our crisped backs so that the tannic acid would ease the pain. Oh, yes. Definitely a painful part of The Smith Beach Experience. And who can forget mom trying to dig out a splinter from deep in the meaty part of your sole with a sewing needle? Yeah. Shoes weren’t optional, they were not worn. So various foot pains became part of The Smith Beach Experience.

Stinging nettles, the jellyfish kind, were part of the experience, too. They were beautiful, translucent, gossamer ghosts floating just below the surface of the water. They’d have long lacey trailing skirts that billowed out behind them. Some would have tinges of red and blue in them. Gorgeous! Until you came into contact with those "lacey trailing skirts." Then they were pure pain. When you were looking the other way, maybe getting ready to try to get up on water-skis, or waiting to try to dunk Dad, the nettle would drift with the current up against you and wrap those tentacles around you. As kids we thought it was acid, as the burning would spread wherever we were touched. There were lots of remedies for nettle stings, though I don’t remember any of them working particularly well. The first thing we would do would be to grab a handful of sand from the bottom and scrub away at the stinging area. In retrospect, that probably just made things worse. Mom would crank out her trustworthy bottle of ammonia. I think that now the preferred treatment is a paste of meat tenderizer. I don’t know why! Ask someone’s mom. That’s just what they tell me! When we would ski back up The Gulf the water would be wall-to-wall nettles. I guess they liked the warm water. Always gave us a great incentive not to fall.

I’m pretty sure I mentioned the bugs before. But until yesterday I had forgotten what happens when the wind shifts. When the wind shifts so that it is no longer coming in off the water, but is now an "onshore breeze," it brings all of the biting black flies from the farmlands. That’s when you stay either under the water or in the house. You’ve got to remember to brush all of the flies off the dog’s back when you let her in, or the house will fill up quickly. No, it isn’t as bad as all that, and the wind has shifted back to offshore, so the flies have gone. Don’t worry.

I first learned about redbugs, chiggers, at Smith Beach. Mom found some blackberry brambles on back off the road down near The Gulf. Dad loved blackberry mush on his ice cream, so we went off blackberry picking. It wasn’t long after that we found these welts on our legs. Itch? I want to tell you!!!! Mom tried all of her old remedies – a poultice of baking soda, a paste of meat tenderizer, swab on ammonia [you think that wasn’t stimulating after you’d already scratched the welt open?] – all to no avail. Once those buggers get under your skin they are harder to get rid of than a mother-in-law! We never did figure it out, then. I guess I just scratched until they had lived their cycle and died. Now I know better. I send my kids to pick the berries, and I stay home in front of the fan with a good book. Being the daddy has its advantages.

One summer when we arrived there was a railroad caboose sitting on the side of the road at the top of the hill near The Gulf. Someone had brought it down and set it up as a guesthouse! I always wanted to see inside it, but I never got the chance. It was there for a couple of years, and then, one year, it was gone again. Like I said, the homes down here are picked up and moved in from all sorts of places. Our house used to be the old print shop up in Eastville. Someone, sometime, hauled it on down here to be a cottage. It now has bedrooms, a porch and other amenities tacked on, but the main structure still has the old open beam ceiling, and catawampus walls. We never have figured out why some of the walls of the old building kind of slope in. Oh, well. Just another little quirk of The Beach.

One house, down at The Beach, used to be the train depot up in Nassawadox. It was abandoned by the railroad, and the Town decided to sell the building to get rid of an eyesore. It was bought by a Smith Beach resident who intended to haul it down for a beach cottage. That was until some of the Nassawadox "heritage and history" people got involved. "How could the Town sell such a valuable [?] piece of its history?" They were all up in arms, and it looked like the sale was going to be reversed. So the Smith Beach-er waited until one dark night, went on up with a truck, hooked up the depot, and started hauling it back to The Beach. When the County Sheriff stopped him out on Route 13, he explained that he was just hauling this old building he had bought down to Smith Beach to set up as a cottage, and he got a police escort the whole way! It wasn’t until the next morning that the folks in Nassawadox realized that the sale had been consummated, and their historic train depot was now a cottage at Smith Beach. But that’s the way it is on The Eastern Shore, and part of the Smith Beach Experience.

And speaking of THE EASTERN SHORE, if you are not from The Shore you might not realize just how special and loved it is. One year the Navy (a major employer in Tidewater) commissioned a new warship – the Virginia. All Virginians were rightly proud, until they noticed the patch, the emblem, of the new vessel. There was the familiar shape of the Commonwealth of Virginia … BUT THEY HAD LEFT OFF THE EASTERN SHORE!!!! Well, that didn’t last long. The hue and cry were loud and long, and soon there was a new patch with the little sand spit that is The Eastern Shore in prominence. Validation.

What do we do for excitement at Smith Beach? Well, you can always go for a walk. Go down to the bottom of the steps, to the beach, and turn left. After about a half-mile you’ve run out of Smith Beach houses. Then, for another half-mile or so, there are fields and the VORTAC, where the Wilkins Beach Hotel used to stand. Then there are just trees on the one side, Bay on the other, and driftwood-strewn sand in front of you. Now you can walk for over a mile and see no one. It used to be that there weren’t even any homes. There are one or two, now, nestled back in the trees, but one or two for a mile of beach is a pretty nice ratio.

Maybe another half-mile down from where the trees start you come to the Sand Hills. This used to be a popular place to party. At least I used to assume so, from the number of empty bottles we’d find next to the cold bonfires sites. [No, I was too young to party down there.] For me, the fun was going to these high dunes, slogging my way to the top, and then racing down them one giant step at a time. We’d explore the Sand Hills, and the pine hollows behind them, looking for pirate treasure. As I said, I was young.

Further down from the Sand Hills was a place you could drive through the woods from the hardtop road, and get out onto the beach. Ann Lewis’ daddy, Hop, had an old red jeep that we used to drive out onto the beach, there. It was a lot of fun. I was afraid of getting caught in the soft sand, but we never did. We just had fun.

Hop used to have an old Owens cabin cruiser he kept at Kings Creek Marina in Cape Charles. The "Wild Rose." He named it after a famous rumrunner from the days of prohibition. Back then Hop owned the local Chevy dealership, and he kept dropping different engines in the Wild Rose to keep her the fastest boat for her size in the area. He used to brag to me that when both engines were running wide open, each would take a stream of gasoline "as big as your little finger." Of course gasoline was a lot cheaper then. He could open both engines up, and ¾ of that 28’ cabin cruiser would come out of the water on a plane. Powerful. I went out fishing with Hop one time, on the Wild Rose. We were drifting in the channel, not having a lot of luck, when all of a sudden we drifted backward up onto a sandbar and stuck. Hop walked to the back of the boat, looked over the transom, went to the controls and threw both engines in full forward. Kind of dug a new channel out of the bar. Got us free, though. That was Hop. I guess he’s gone, now, him and Sassy.

A little trivia for you [you say this whole thing’s trivia!?] – you remember I mentioned The Cell, and said that it was an old Navy degaussing station? Dad told me that when he commanded a Navy ship, back during the War, he went through The Cell. The idea was to demagnetize your metal ship to help protect it from magnetic mines. You had to make sure all clocks and watches and the like were off the vessel, then you’d maneuver it into The Cell where they’d hook up cables and run electric currents through the hull of the ship. Just thought you’d like to know.

The other day Rachel suggested that we name our cottage. She wants to call it "Paradise Found." That, of course, got me thinking of the other cottages up and down the road, and the names their owners have given them.

The first home that I remember being named was Hefty’s. When he retired to The Beach from Florida he named his cottage "Starve Easy." I always liked that. Smith and Martha have kept the name. Of course. Tradition and heritage mean a lot on The Eastern Shore.

The first house on the road has a sign that says POSTED NO TRESPASSING KEEP OUT. If that’s what they named their cottage, I’m not impressed.

Across the street from Hefty’s is "The Crooked White House." Reggie and Pam aren’t making a political statement. It’s just that their house, which used to be the upper floor of a two-story country store, has a lot of add-ons, making it … well, crooked. Actually, it’s kind of interesting. At the north end of their lot they’ve tied four little wooden barn-sheds together to make one long storage area. Next-door Colonel Adams named his place "At Ease." That’s a lot cuter than when Ches and Nora Wise called it "Wise Cottage." Very nice people. Not a lot of imagination.

Next door to Hefty’s is the old Weirwood train station. You can’t tell that’s what the basic building is, anymore, but they still have the red-and-yellow WEIRWOOD depot sign up on the side so you can see it as you go down the road.

The other side of Reggie and Pam is "Twasadump." T’was one, too. I visited it years ago when Tommy Wilson and his family rented there. Certainly is attractive, now.

"Yankee Land" is the two-story owned by Jan and Eileen. They are from Connecticut, and, I guess, aren’t ashamed to admit that they are "come here’s," as opposed to "from here’s." Eventually they’ll be "stay here’s." "Yankee Land" used to be a shacky little one-story place when Tommy Fox still owned it as a rental. Jan and Eileen have torn down and added on so much, I wonder if any of the original structure’s still there.

Tommy Fox, the daddy, used to be the undertaker. (His son, Tom, still is.) Dad used to joke that he often got worried when he’d shake hands with Tommy and Tommy’d ask, "How’re you feeling?" Dad was always afraid that Tommy was out looking for business.

There’s "Stumpy’s Hideaway." Stumpy was dying of cancer but he still used to ride his little golf cart up and down the road to visit neighbors. Until the Game Warden told him that it was illegal to drive it on a public road. Poor Stumpy. He’s gone, now.

There’s a new sign out at one cottage – "Four Sea Sons." I don’t know the folks, but it is honoring their four boys. Cute. Of course, I hear she’s pregnant, again. I wonder if they’ll change the name of their place.

Uncle Carl named their place "3 C’s." I used to know who the 3 "C’s" were. There was Uncle Carl. His son Carl Owen … but then there were Brent, David, Aunt Ernie. I don’t know. Brent’s still there. I’ll have to ask him, some day.

Next door to Chris Wilson, the builder, is "Conched Out." I like that. Others, up and down the road, are "Pelican Point," "Out to Pasture," there are two "Roost’s," the Russell’s and Roberts’, "Donovan’s Reef" [a great John Wayne/Lee Marvin movie], "The Last Resort," "Honker Flats," "Saturday Cottage," "Paradise on The Bay," and "Hulabaloo and Chaos Too." I’d love to know the story behind that one.

When I started writing this thing it was in response to the question about what is there to do [that’s exciting] at Smith Beach. I think I’ve shown that things are pretty basic at The Beach. Of course, that’s now. Years ago, well, there wasn’t even television at The Beach. That was an "up-town" opulence. I remember the year that we rented the cottage at the top of the hill from the folks from Pennsylvania. They had a stereo AND a television. Man, that was luxury.

No TV, so what did we do nights? Well, after a magnificent sunset we’d go out and walk. Either on The Beach or on the road. Back then there were no streetlights on the road, and no "light pollution" to degrade the night’s clarity. I’ve heard about the billions of start that you can see when you are out in the middle of the ocean. Well,

it can’t be more than we’d see walking down The Beach. Awesome! The jet-black sky would be heavily powdered with stars. Mom would point out the different constellations for us. Dad would point out the different flashing lights on the black horizon. That flashing light over there was Wolf Trap Light. That one is Cabbage Patch. Sometimes we’d gather up driftwood, dig a hole, and have a bonfire on The Beach. The salt-impregnated wood would burn with beautiful colors.

Without electronic pastimes, though, windy days, when we couldn’t go fishing, became more of a challenge. What to do? Well, believe it or not we would go sightseeing. Mom would find all sorts of places for us to go.

Would you believe an indoor rose farm? Several big hothouses packed with plant tables packed with rose bushes. Each bush was entered into the computer so that its output was carefully monitored, and when a given plant wasn’t producing up to snuff it could be replaced. Water and nutrients were all carefully monitored and applied. A very scientific operation. Fascinating.

Another interesting place was the clam farm down on Cherrystone Creek. They grew their own "soup" to feed the little ones, move them from flat-to-flat as they grew, and would sell seed clams to commercial clamming operations. Pretty neat. Must work. There is now a clam farm down at The Gulf.

South of Cape Charles, off Route 13, was Custis Tomb. I used to get a real laugh out of this place. The story is that John Custis was a bachelor who finally married and brought his bride to his home, Arlington, on The Eastern Shore. It didn’t take too long before he and his wife started arguing, and ultimately got to the point that they would only talk with each other through their house slave. One day he had the slave, Pompey, "Ask Mrs. Custis if she would like to go for a carriage ride." She responded in the affirmative, and he helped her up into the carriage and drove off … albeit in chilly silence. They got down to the beach and were riding along the water’s edge when Colonel Custis turned the carriage into The Bay. As the water comes up to the floorboards, Mrs. Custis turned to her husband and asked, "Mr. Custis, where are you going?"

"To hell, madam, to hell."

"Drive on, Mr. Custis. Any place is better than Arlington with you."

"Madam, I believe you would as leave meet the Devil himself if I should drive to hell."

"Quite true, Sir," she answered. "I know you so well I would not be afraid to go anywhere you would go."

At that point Custis turned the carriage around and returned home. Upon his death Custis’ direction had the following engraved on his tombstone:

Under this Marble Tomb lies ye Body of the Honorable John Custis Esqr. of the City of Williamsburg and Parish of Bruton Formerly of Hungars Parish and the Eastern Shore of Virginia and County of Northampton the Place of his Nativity Aged 71 years and Yet liv'd but Seven Years which was the space of time He kept a Batchelers house at Arlington on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

Always one for the last word, that John Custis.

We’d also go and visit homes and gardens. There are a lot of old colonial homes on The Shore, and many of them have formal gardens around them. We’d visit Pointe Farm on Savage Neck, and if we were lucky George Ames would be there and take us in for a tour. I remember he had a whiskey flask shaped like a big soft pretzel. Finny the things you remember. We also visited Eyre Hall, near Cheriton, and Vaucluse. In the gardens at Vaucluse was a sundial that was inscribed:

Time flies, you say?

Ah, no.

Time stays,

We go!

Sounds like a good place to end this segment.

Memory is an interesting thing. When you try to jog it, it rebels. But when you are lying in bed late at night, trying so hard to get to sleep, it comes alive. When I am trying to quiet my mind and drift off into slumber, memory and imagination come alive, and then I could write reams and reams. Pulitzer Prize-winning prose. The problem is struggling to remember it the next day to put it on paper. I wonder how many masterworks I have written while vainly attempting to sleep that I have not been able to recall the following morning. Frustrating. Ah, well.

What to do that is exciting at Smith Beach? Well, if the tide is out you can always go clamming. That can consume a lot of time. It’s usually a lot of fun, too. I remember all of us piling into the scow and running down to the sandbar across from the mouth of The Gulf. At low tide a lot of this sandbar would be completely dry, and that’s where we would beach the boat. The fathers would wear old shoes, tie a line around their waists and to a bushel basket in an inflated innertube, and head out to chest-deep water with their clam rakes. There they would walk long rows, digging their rakes about six inches down into grass and sand, feeling for a hard scratch against the sharpened tines, that signaled a buried clam. Hopefully. Sometimes it indicated an old beer bottle. Or a whelk. Or an empty shell. But often enough it was a clam, which Dad or Poppa Jim would hook under with their rake, bring up to the surface, and toss into their basket. We’d usually end up with near a bushel of clams. When Uncle Carl would bring up a clam that was a small one, he’d throw it into the basket with enough force to break the shell. Then he’d laughingly say, "Whoops! Broke another one," and he’d shuck it right there, rinse it off in the salty Bay waters, and eat it. I thought he was crazy. I know better, now. Clams on the half shell.

While Dad and Poppa Jim were out doing the hard work of raking, Mom and Mollie would be in shallow water, just walking and looking. Mom was good at scrootching her toes down into sand feeling for clams. I liked to try it, but I was always afraid I’d find a blue crab instead. When she’d feel one, one of us kids, Little Jim or me, would dive down and dig under her foot to retrieve it. Mom could occasionally get some really good hip action going "dancing" her way along feeling for the clams. Uncle Charlie used to be able to "sign" clams – walking along looking for some sort of surface sign that a clam was hiding beneath the wet sand. I never could figure out how he did it. "Look for the keyhole," he’d say. Yeah, right. Never ever did find a clam "signing." Boy, Charlie could, though.

One time while we were out there as I was walking in waist-deep water I stepped on a baby flounder. All I knew was that I stepped on this moving – THING!!! – that frantically swam up my leg and up into my bathing suit. I somehow got a death grip on it and threw it a mile. Then I raced to the boat and refused to set foot in the water the rest of the day! SCARED ME TO DEATH! Yeah, you can laugh sitting at home reading this, but you try it as a pre-teen kid! Bet you’d be scared too.

 

When we’d get back with all of our clams we’d stick a pole upright in the shallow water out in front of the house, for a marker, and plant the clams around the pole to keep them available until we wanted to eat them. Sometimes instead of the pole we’d take an old tire, put it out in the shallows, and put the clams in the sand in the middle of the tire.

Then there was the day that a neighbor, someone who was not a "regular" at Smith Beach, told us that we were wasting our time going all the way to The Gulf for our clams. Why, he had been clamming right off the beach, and found a whole bed of clams! Dug up almost a bushel full! You guessed it. He had found our stock of planted clams. I don’t know if Dad and Poppa Jim ever did tell him what he had done. After all, he just didn’t know any better. Didn’t bother me any. I wasn’t going to eat any of those nasty things (ah, the ignorance of youth)!

Another thing that was always fun, and still is today, is just walking the beach at low tide. Just to see what there is to see. You never can tell what will wash up.

Once, a number of years ago, there was a strike or something at the coal loading docks in Norfolk across The Bay. Or maybe it was the trains hauling the coal that were on strike. Whatever the cause, it resulted in a whole fleet of colliers – that’s coal-hauling ships – lying at anchor at the mouth of The Bay, seaside of the Bridge-Tunnel. The sailors on these foreign-flagged ships didn’t worry a lot about the EPA, and a lot of interesting trash ended up in The Bay and washed up on Smith Beach. Mom and Dad found foreign-language food packaging, packing crates, and newspapers. An interesting grab-bag.

One time a tractor-trailer hauling grapefruit went off of the Bridge-Tunnel. An elderly couple in a car stopped on the downside of one of the high bridges to see the sights, and the truck coming over the top couldn’t stop before hitting them. Mom and Dad walked the beach and had enough citrus to keep them and the neighbors puckered up for weeks.

In my early years Little Jim was walking at low tide and found a little flat-bottomed boat partially buried in the sand. Her name was on the transom board – FLEA. We dug her up and hauled her back to the house. To an adult it was obvious why the Flea had been set adrift, but to us kids she was beautiful. She was ours! The Queen Mary. The Golden Hind. The Queen Anne’s Revenge. Our very own B*O*A*T! Of course, her bottom planks were sprung and rotten, so she leaked like a sieve. Her paint was scabbed and cancerous. But for two weeks that summer the Flea was resurrected and played with daily and loved. She sailed to the islands of the Caribbean, attacked treasure-laden galleons, and fought off hoards of bloodthirsty pirates.

One day I was walking up the other way, and found a fiberglass fishing boat that had washed up on some rocks that a homeowner had dumped over the bank to help protect against The Bay’s erosive effect. The bottom was holed, and most of the equipment had been stripped off of it. Within a couple of days even this hulk was gone, and we never did find out who or why or where. But a kid’s imagination had pirates and violence and adventure.

 

There is always something interesting to find when walking The Beach at low tide. It’s just a matter of seeing it. I’m fortunate in that. I am a photographer and have trained myself to see things differently. When I look at things, I look for the artistic and photographic features. For instance, walking in the shallows you have to really see the beautiful things. Like the way those pebbles and that crab shell fit together into a piece of art. It’s all a matter of actually seeing what you look at.

Or walk along and look at the trees. The weather and the wind from The Bay are brutal, but artistic as they work on the trees and the banks and The Beach. As you walk along, you have to make the effort to see the things before you. Look at the vines climbing up that tree trunk. No, don’t just look at them. SEE them

.

Sure you can see God’s artwork in places other than at Smith Beach and on The Chesapeake Bay. But there is so much to be seen here. And it is so under appreciated.

You know, even just the sand and sandbars are beautiful. Wait until low tide, and go look. Look at the design and the colors and the shadows. The geometric designs. I know. I wax poetic. But I think it’s beautiful.

 

I am so glad that Smith Beach is on The Eastern Shore and faces west. I don’t do mornings well, anymore, so I don’t get to see a lot of sunrises. But every night that it isn’t raining, or totally clouded over, the sunsets over The Bay are magnificent. I have a Smith Beach sunset as the "wallpaper" on my computer, and I found myself doubting that the colors could actually be so rich and vibrant. Maybe I "diddled" the colors a little bit with the computer. Let me show you.

See what I mean? But this is what we have, night after night, at Smith Beach. Am I claiming that you only find this sort of beauty at Smith Beach? Well, no. I saw some phenomenal sunsets in Viet Nam, and we have some nice ones down in Fort Lauderdale, but this is the norm at Smith Beach. And that makes it very special. Don’t you agree?

Joe Downes, Sr. wrote and reminded me of some things. Actually (forgive me, Joe) he remembers stuff from before I even heard of Smith Beach! Man!

Almost everybody at The Beach has a boat. If you’ve read anything I’ve written before this you know that if you don’t like the water, then there’s nothing for you to do at The Beach. Joe reminded me of Tom Smith’s boat. Down at The Gulf, right next to the ramp where we could launch our boats, was a locked boathouse. If you peeked in through a crack in the door, or hunkered down and looked in through the end, you could see Tom Smith’s boat hanging there. If I remember correctly it was a gorgeous, shiny-varnished Chris Craft. Is that right, Joe? I don’t ever remember seeing it in the water, but Joe remembers riding in Tom’s boat. He tells me that back before there was a road to the boathouse, if you would help Tom carry five-gallon cans of gasoline through the woods to the boat, he’d take you water skiing. One year when we arrived the boathouse, and the boat, were gone.

So much has changed at Smith Beach, over the years. And yet everything remains the same. That’s the beauty of The Eastern Shore, at least the Lower Shore, and Smith Beach. It is a way of life that has been proven by time and tradition. It shows that you can be surrounded by the manic bustle of modern life, but still remain gentle and genteel. It shows that there can be things more important than a dollar – like history and tradition and manners and civility and friends and a tried and true way of country life. Those of us who look to the Lower Shore and Smith Beach as an anchor or normalcy in our frantic rat race lives can only pray that the forces of development (development does not necessarily equal progress) and the quest for the almighty dollar do not ultimately destroy what for now is such a joy.