Chesapeake (151 page)

‘Owen!’ Mrs. Steed called as the osprey couples wheeled through the air. ‘You must see this!’ And he came from the house to stand with his wife as the wild courtship flight continued, now low above the water, now high in the heavens, and after a while one of the males led his partner to the nest closest to where the Steeds were standing, and as she inspected his work he flew up and down the creek until he spotted a small fish. Diving swiftly, he caught it, rose well into the heavens, then flew to his nest, where, standing on tiptoes, he fed the delicacy to his mate.

The watching humans joined hands, and Ethel said, ‘We need nature for what it teaches us.’

‘Or what it reminds us of,’ Owen said.

In the days that followed, the females began to nest, and now the males had to fish with doubled tenacity.

When young Christopher Pflaum scandalized the citizens of Patamoke by establishing his home south of the Choptank—something no member
of a major family had ever done—the men at the store had an easy explanation for his outrageous behavior: ‘Think back! His grandmother was a Turlock. So was his mom, and with blood like that, you never know what to expect.’ One village philosopher added, ‘Come to think of it, them Turlocks always loved marshes. It was blood speakin’, that’s what it was.’

The reason was simpler and more beautiful. One dark night in 1967, as the lieutenant in charge of a bedraggled outfit struggling through the jungles of Vietnam, he had experienced a revelation. In Korea some years before, Hiram Cater had found the meaning of the Choptank; now Chris Pflaum was about to make his discovery in Vietnam, and that is the risk and reward which comes from sending generations of intelligent young men to duty in alien lands: when they return they see their homeland clearly.

Chris had already spent seven months in futile jungle fighting, and his unit had been so constantly engaged in destruction and pillage that he was sick of war, but he was even more sick of the manner in which some patrol mates complained of every aspect of their lives. Like his grandfather, Otto, and his rugged father, Hugo, he believed that men must tolerate what is unavoidable but strive to better it, yet he had to listen as the men bitched: the food, the gooks, the officers, the climate, the crud, the lack of ammunition, the absence of air cover, the failure of the corporal to locate a supply of fresh socks. The breaking point came when a soldier from New Hampshire slapped his arm and whined, ‘These damned mosquitoes are killin’ me.’

‘Hell,’ Chris snapped, ‘they’re gnats. Back home we got mosquitoes as big as pigeons.’

‘You what?’

A brawl ensued, and when it ended, with no victors, Chris sat by himself in the growing darkness and tried honestly to evaluate his life: Happiest I’ve ever been was when I explored the marshes along the Choptank. And without further reflection, he wrote a letter to the only real estate dealer he knew, Washburn Turlock of Patamoke:

Early next morning he posted the letter, and when it was gone he experienced such soaring euphoria that he knew he had done right; he had made his commitment to a way of life, to a specific quality of land and water and deer and muskrats. With each passing day in the jungle he was increasingly satisfied with his decision, and much sooner than he had expected, Washburn Turlock reported:

When the leave plane neared McGuire Air Force Base in 1968, Chris began to sweat, and on the speedy drive down to the Delmarva Peninsula his excitement grew. His wife reported, ‘I haven’t seen the land yet, but Mr. Turlock says it’s exactly what you wanted.’

Chris stopped in Patamoke only long enough to embrace his mother, then sped over the bridge to the south shore. He drove west down one of the fingers reaching out toward the bay, then along a narrow road and finally down a long lane. ‘These must be our loblollies,’ he said as the stately trees closed in, and then before him stood the old Cline house, and the rotting slave quarters, and the solid pier stretching out into the Little Choptank, and all things were twice as appealing as he had imagined. But the best part lay off to the west, where the little estuary joined the bay, for there stood the marsh from which Herman Cline’s rented slaves had chopped out fast land. It waited as it had in the time of Captain John Smith, unspoiled, trembling in the wind, crowded with living things and restless from the motion of the invading water. It seemed endless, many times larger than he had hoped for, and he could visualize himself leading his children into its heart and disclosing to them its secrets. He tried to speak, but his mind was filled with the drumbeat of the discredited poem:

Look how the grace of the sea doth go
About and about through the intricate channels that flow
Here and there,
Everywhere,
Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the
low-lying lanes,
And the marsh is meshed with a million veins …

In this twelve-month period four men—two old, two young—came back to the Choptank, impelled by sharply different motives. Pusey Paxmore had crept home to die at the end of a shattered life. Owen Steed had prudently fled Oklahoma with sufficient funds to repurchase his family plantation. And Chris Pflaum had retired from the Army as a bemedaled major, with a research job at the Chesapeake Center for the Study of Estuaries and a waiting home deep in the Choptank marshes.

Hiram Cater was difficult to categorize; the warden had granted him a compassionate leave so that he might attend the funeral of his parents. Jeb and Julia had been born in the same year, had struggled through decades of poverty enforced by their society, and had survived to see two of their children in federal penitentiaries. Often in their last years, as they sat in their antiseptic new brick cubicle, they castigated themselves for failures they could not explain, not realizing that it was Patamoke that had failed, not they. In 1977 they died within three days of each other, and their son Hiram was allowed home to bury them. At the grave he stood silent, and as soon as the brief ceremony ended he returned to prison, knowing that he could never again live in Patamoke.

Major Pflaum was different from the other three, for he returned with honor and a burgeoning desire to accomplish something; during his military service he had been assigned to many duty stations on four different continents and knew that few places on earth compared in physical beauty and spiritual ease with the Chesapeake.

But as he started his research at the estuarine center he found himself engaged in a furious running debate with his father, Hugo Pflaum, who had spent fifty-one years defending the rivers and the bay. He resented it when his son proclaimed, ‘Nobody around here seems to give a damn about the future of this region.’

‘In your omniscience,’ Hugo growled, ‘have you bothered to look at what we’ve accomplished? The laws that prevent men like Uncle Ruthven from palisading marshes and covering them with concrete? Our regulations protecting wetlands so that ducks will find something to eat? And the way we’ve confiscated those murderous long guns?’

‘Uncle Amos’s, too?’

‘We’ll get it, one of these days.’

‘But the land, Pop. It’s going to hell.’

‘You talk like an idiot,’ Hugo said. ‘Our Eastern Shore’s one of the best places left on earth.’

‘Pop! Will you get in a car with me and take a look?’

‘I sure will.’ The old warden bristled, and he joined his son in a pickup for a survey of the roads leading out of Patamoke.

‘Now all I want,’ Chris said, ‘is for you to look at the grassy shoulders … and the ditches.’ And when Hugo did, he understood what his son was complaining about, for the roads were littered with empty beer cans and soda bottles. It seemed as if the law required each resident of Maryland to drink three cans of something every day and toss the proof along the highway.

Glumly the old man conceded, ‘This is pretty bad, Chris.’

His son slammed on the brakes and said, ‘I got a proposition for you, Pop. Let’s walk a quarter of a mile, out and back. Just count the cans and bottles.’ As they moved slowly down the road they counted eighty-seven. Crossing over and walking back to the pickup, they found another seventy-two. ‘So on an average quarter mile of rural road we have a hundred fifty-nine—more than six hundred a mile. Schlitz, Miller, Budweiser, Michelob. The heraldry of modern America.’

‘I think you stacked the deck on me,’ Hugo objected. ‘This is a lovers’ lane and you know how young people like to mess up everything.’ But when they found a lovely back road it, too, had its quota of empties, the aluminum cans and the bottles good for a thousand years.

Grudgingly Hugo said, ‘It really is pretty bad, Chris,’ and when his son launched a campaign in the
Bugle
to clean up the roadsides, he contributed a sharp article arguing that men and women who had done such a good job of saving ducks and geese ought also to stop desecrating their landscape. His letter drew scorn, but Chris’s pressure goaded the authorities to appoint a commission to study the matter. Within a few weeks it reported:

Young persons, and some older too, expressed their displeasure at the Pflaum interference by initiating an interesting ritual: they accumulated empty beer cans in the backs of their cars and tossed them in large numbers into the Pflaum ditches. Some mornings on his way to work Chris would find two dozen beer cans at the end of his lane, but he realized that within a few weeks the animosity would be dissipated. What did disturb him was that wherever he looked in this marvelous bay region, the desecration was the same. It was this casual plundering of the landscape that infuriated him, this supine acceptance of despoliation. The government was powerless to protect the environment, because its citizens had become accustomed to drinking beverages from throw-away bottles and cans; Norman Turlock, having invested money in a process that deformed the landscape, was to be protected to infinity, and any system of picking up the refuse or preventing its deposit in the first place was forbidden because it would inconvenience someone.

‘Hell!’ he said one day as he drove along a road south of the Choptank. ‘One fine morning we’ll awaken to find the land smothered in beer cans.’ But when he tried to reopen the question in the columns of the
Bugle,
he was told by the editor, ‘No one’s interested in that nonsense any more.’

It was Hugo who tried to temper his bitterness. ‘Chris, you got to keep things in perspective. The beer cans are a disgrace, but there’s a whole paradise here that’s unsullied.’ And he cranked up the boat he used to patrol the oyster beds. ‘I want you to see for yourself how much we have left.’ Mile after mile of the lesser rivers displayed banks carefully tended and expansive lawns free of contamination, but even so, Hugo said, ‘You can’t appreciate how well we’ve protected the Eastern Shore till you see the western.’ So they roared out into the Chesapeake, crossing over to the rivers south of Annapolis, and there young Chris had a chance to see how lack of zoning and policing had encouraged this shoreline to become a marine slum. It was appalling, one little house after another crowded up against its neighbor, one wharf after another falling into disrepair. The shoreline was eroding and no attention was paid it; most developments had been haphazard and decrepit from the day of building.

‘That’s really something to worry about,’ the older Pflaum said as they began their return trip. ‘That’s a lot more serious than beer cans.’

When they reached the broad mouth of the Choptank, Hugo steered toward that loveliest of the eastern rivers, the Tred Avon: a broad, quiet estuary, a group of exquisite tributaries and innumerable coves, each with its own superb view. The boat slowed as the Pflaums studied the shoreline, one well-preserved home after another, not ostentatious but most attractive, hiding among tall trees.