in Westminster, Maryland, but her mother’s people hail from Kent County, north of Dorchester County on the Eastern Shore. She tried to explain the Shore separation to me. “They still haven’t gotten over the Bridge being built,” she said. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge was built in 1952 and shortened the trip from Baltimore to the Atlantic beaches by some four hours.
“The Bridge!” I replied. “They’re not over the Civil War!”
“No, they’re not,” she agreed.
Americans are still defined by Civil War labels, and we like acting out our bloody history. I took my father to a Gettysburg reenactment where we watched General Longstreet’s fight against the Louisiana regiments. The reenactment was the biggest in history: 30,000 reenactors and spectators converged on southern Pennsylvania to try to resolve our nation’s unresolved rift. One reenactor proudly told me that he was wearing his great-granddaddy’s Confederate coat. The grandstands were packed shoulder to shoulder, and I felt terribly Roman as we watched men shoot at each other and dodge pyrotechnics in full uniform.
When Longstreet won, we spectators applauded. “Thank God, we won!” rose up a general cheer. We were genuinely happy. We are no longer split. We are still united. We are one nation divergent, under some God. We had to say it out loud, like a conjuring, like a prayer, to remind not only ourselves but the 51,000 phantoms hanging above us, right over our unsuspecting heads.
April 2nd
A Chilled Wind
Because of its physiographic variety, Maryland is nicknamed Little America. The timbered Allegheny Mountains of the Appalachian Plateau in the state’s western corner taper down into rich piedmont farmland and eventually meander into the coastal plain that engulfs the Chesapeake Bay. The roads between Baltimore and Cambridge belt cities, skirt suburbia and span a massive estuary. Half an hour and the city fades away as the road curves into the emerald tunnel of Route 97, banking south. A temperate zone has its price for green; lush vines and junk trees crowd the woods, cloaking light poles and road signs. Cross the Severn River twice, and hunting, fishing and boating shops crop up between strip malls. On the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Route 50 sinks down to the level right under the horizon, where it bakes and floats all the way to the Atlantic. Rippling fields rise up around the tarmac, and the wind smells of brine and sun, even under nights of rain. The sky lowers over the car roof, and clouds touch down behind the farmhouses. Flocks of birds mysteriously emerge from the alfalfa and loop and curve overhead. The air’s thick with water. The car hovers over the road. Time suspends to a crawl, stutters and corners of it reach backwards. People talk slower.
The ex-rector of Cambridge’s Christ Church blames the town’s many typhoid epidemics on its isolation. “Cambridge’s so alone,” Father Martin said. “They were all dying and had no where to go.” Disgustingly, the typhoid outbreaks are better blamed on the county’s extremely high water table. With a high water table, graveyards and privies easily contaminate water sources. Dorchester County is damp; its wetlands house a convergence of six rivers: the Blackwater, the Chicanacomico, the Choptank, the Honga, the Nanticoke and the Transquaking.
“So, you’re going to Cambridge,” said my friend Lou, grinning. At the time of that statement, we were sitting at the bar in the Club Charles in Baltimore.
“I’ve got a writing gig there,” I said. “I know it sounds like the boonies, but there might be some good ghost stories.” The real boondocks probably weren’t Cambridge itself; the true boondocks lurked outside of town in the gangly stretches of corn, swamp and neck overwhelming it. “I think I wanna tell ghost stories.”
“Nice,” he said, tipping back on his bar stool. “Just don’t leave Route 50.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you been there? You leave town and all bets are off. It’s one freaked place,” Lou said, smirking and drinking beer. “Cambridge’s very strange,” he said. “It’s an odd mix. It’s filled with people who think it’s the hood, and with old, weird people and Deliverance outside of town.” He’s a mediator, another North Dakotan, married to Adrienne and the one who tells the Bill Pullman Story. He has short, sandy hair, and the friends in his group sometimes refer to him as The Emperor.
Late afternoon in early April, teetering on the brink of dusk, I drove southeast to my first meeting with the Dorchester Arts Center. Eighty miles from Baltimore and beyond the Bay Bridge and the Eastern Shore town of Easton, Route 50 twists at the edge of the thick forest of southern Talbot County, and a vista opens to allow the Choptank River, the northern boundary of Dorchester County, to cut its twisting path through the Eastern Shore to the Bay. As my car hurtled over the mile-and-a-half-long Frederick C. Malkus, Jr. Bridge, the setting sun lit a wide, orange ripple of water, rolling sideways across the darkening river, following me to the Cambridge side. The crest of the wave riveted me; surely it was an optical illusion or a boat wake. But there were no boats in sight. The river was clear, and there was no obvious source for the wave. I wondered about river currents.
Directly after the Choptank, I veered off Route 50’s fast food sprawl and out of the 21st century onto Maryland Avenue. Victorian and Depression clapboard houses crowded out convenient stores and business parks. A deep, brackish drainage ditch lined the side of the road by the river; drainage ditches line most Dorchester County roads. Little earthen bridges over scummy moats allowed access to homes. After a mile of quaint Avenue, a narrow drawbridge spanned several hundred years and thin, idyllic Cambridge Creek.
“Once you go over the creek, you turn right into the town. You can’t go wrong,” said Judy.
The creek was thick with boat; sail masts hollowly clanked my arrival. Boat slips lined the retaining walls of restaurants and condominiums. A paddleboat named the Choptank Queen carried a smattering of tourists, pointing at the land. Seagulls screeched and swooped over the hood of my car. Several watermen unloaded dripping baskets off tipping oyster boats.
In the decades after the Civil War, during the unsteady Restoration, some Confederate Eastern Shore watermen broke stringent racial boundaries of the rural Eastern Shore. They worked side by side in the 1870s oyster industry with fishermen of color. Those color-less work habits drove Dorchester County gentry to complain that in Cambridge “mongrels were usurping the kennels of thoroughbreds.”3
Like Maryland, Dorchester County is split socially and economically, between the reigning, blue-blood elite of Cambridge’s High Street and the fishing and farming, blue-collar marsh inhabitants outside of town.
“There’s a huge disparity of classes in Cambridge, still,” said my friend Debbie. She’s a lawyer for the state of Maryland and a native Baltimorean. In college, she made up an adjective to describe the clanking, clicking noises that kitchen utensils make when they bump into each other; she called it kirky. Her slightly turned-up nose is coated with freckles.
“Weren’t there riots in the 60s?” I asked. Those were the Cambridge ghost stories I remembered. “Something about the courthouse.”
“It was the 60s, Mary. There were riots everywhere,” Debbie said.
Cambridge has a population of 10,911 living residents in a wet, 6.78-mile stretch between a river and a creek. Its town dock was a battlefield during the Oyster Wars, and the Choptank was a battlefield during the American Revolution, The War of 1812 and the Civil War. In 1945, journalist Lee McCardell described the town. He said, “the old Eastern Shore is High Street, subdued, shady, possibly a little aloof, with fine old houses and spacious lawns guarding its dignified and stately march down to the river.”4
That’s High Street: aloof, stately, and guarded while four blocks away to the south hulks a clapboard ghetto of peeling, one-room shacks.
Wealthy historic High Street is a study in Queen Anne and Federal architecture, with some Greek revival, Georgian and Shingle thrown in to break up the columns. Primeval trees form an umbrella that shade governors, assemblymen and lawyers: the white men who once ruled Dorchester County and the state of Maryland. None of the original thirteen colonial families own the houses of High Street now, but they were once the first families of the