Chesapeake (75 page)

But to Levin Paxmore he whispered, as their horses moved in the early sunlight, ‘I spoke perhaps too freely under the stars. You’ll keep what I said confidential?’

‘I shall honor thy request,’ Paxmore said, whereupon Lee pressed into the Quaker’s hand a personal communication from Washington. Paxmore waited to open it until he had returned to his desk at the boatyard. Then carefully he unfolded the paper, spread it smoothly, and read:

That day Levin Paxmore compiled an honest account of every shilling he had spent on the revolution, including the replacement of his sheds and a wage for his wife, and when President Washington signed the authorizing bill, Paxmore was paid in full, and it was this military money that formed the foundation of the Paxmore fortune.

WINTER ALONG THE EASTERN SHORE WAS USUALLY
clement. An occasional freezing of some salt-free river, or a desultory fall of snow which soon melted, indicated that winter was at hand, but because of the modifying effects of both the Atlantic and the Chesapeake, temperatures never dropped very low.

But in January 1811 there came a sudden snowfall of some inches, and farmers along the shore stayed indoors until it passed. Thomas Applegarth, twenty-seven years old, unmarried, tenant on a farm near Patamoke owned by the Steeds, used these days of enforced idleness to study a book lent him by Elizabeth Paxmore, for whom he sometimes did odd jobs. It was a geography of the eastern states, and what impressed him was the manner in which the mountains of Pennsylvania drifted in a marked direction from northeast to southwest. Even the dullest mind would have deduced, from this new map, that some extraordinary force had determined the lay of these mountains, but what that might have been, Applegarth had not enough training to detect.

Yet as he studied the map he vaguely recalled something he had read recently about events that had occurred long ago in Europe, but what precisely they were he could not remember. And then, toward dusk, as it came time for him to tend the cattle, he put down his book, went out and walked along a frozen path to the barn, and as he did so he came upon a small accumulation of ice under a tree, and suddenly the whole mystery of the Pennsylvania mountains and the formation of the Chesapeake became clear to him, as if someone had struck a monstrous match in a darkened valley: Ice! That’s what it was that scarred the mountains of Europe. And that’s what dug out our valleys in America!

He could not grasp what an ice age was, nor the vastness of the sheet
that had at one time lain over Pennsylvania, but he saw clearly one fact: that the ice sheet must have contained within it an enormous quantity of water, and when the ice finally melted, that water must have formed a gigantic river, parent to the present Susquehanna. And that river, nothing else, had reamed out the Chesapeake Bay and deposited the silt which had become, in time, the Eastern Shore.

His concept was so grand, and its parts fell together so neatly, that as he milked the cows in the shadows thrown by his lantern he existed in a kind of glory. ‘That’s how it must have happened,’ he whispered to himself. ‘The world up north was imprisoned under a mantle of ice, and when it melted, it scarred the mountains and filled the valleys with tremendous rivers.’

The idea so preoccupied him that on the first clear day he drove down to Peace Cliff to return Mrs. Paxmore’s book and ask her whether she believed it was possible for America to have experienced an age of ice.

‘A what?’ she asked.

‘I read that northern Europe—well, this was long ago—it had ice on it.’

‘I suppose Russia has ice every year,’ she said.

‘No, this book said that the entire land had ice hundreds of feet thick … all over it.’

‘Nothing could have lived,’ she protested.

‘That’s exactly it,’ Applegarth said. ‘The ice had to be very thick to gouge out the valleys.’

‘To what?’

‘Have you ever looked at the mountains of Pennsylvania?’ he asked.

‘I’ve never been to Pennsylvania.’

‘I mean a map.’

‘I’ve never seen a map of Pennsylvania.’

‘There’s one here in your book.’

‘There is?’ It irritated the Quaker woman to think that there could be either maps or ideas with which she was not familiar, and she took the book from Applegarth rather rudely and thumbed through it. ‘Why, so there is,’ she said, and she studied the map with care.

‘See how the mountains all run in the same direction?’ the farmer said.

‘What’s that signify?’

‘They were gouged out by a heavy layer of ice moving southwest.’

The idea was so novel that Mrs. Paxmore had nothing in her past reflection by which to judge it, but she was one of those Quaker women to whom all knowledge was important, so she stood firmly on her left foot, with her right cocked at an angle, and considered the remarkable thesis that her odd-job man was proposing, and the more she pondered his words, the more inherently reasonable they became. ‘It could have happened that way,’ she said.

‘And if it did,’ Applegarth continued, ‘then the whole valley of the Susquehanna, as we know it today … Well, it must have been a stupendous river. A hundred times bigger than we see it.’

With a solid finger he outlined on the map the principal features of his theory, coming at last to the Chesapeake itself. ‘Our bay must have been the mouth of that immense river. What do you think of that?’

In the weeks that followed, and during the long winter nights, Thomas Applegarth and Elizabeth Paxmore studied whatever they could find about ice ages and mountains; they found little. Speculation about the formation of earth features had only just begun in the United States; the fascinating revelations which were being evolved in Europe could not have been known in Patamoke, but one day Mrs. Paxmore did turn up an interesting piece of information.

A professor of moral philosophy at Yale University had been dabbling in scientific matters. And he came up with the interesting concept that a river like the Hudson in New York could best be understood as ‘a drowned river valley.’ The phrase captivated Mrs. Paxmore and she discussed it with her husband.

‘Isn’t that a splendid imagination? A river valley which has been drowned, inundated by the sea!’

‘Sounds to me like a sad misuse of words,’ her husband said. ‘A pig can drown. Or a little boy who falls out of his canoe. Because they stop breathing and are drowned. But how could a river drown? Tell me that.’

‘It doesn’t drown,’ she replied. ‘It is drowned.’

George Paxmore leaned back to consider this foray into logic. Then, with a brusque wave of his hand, he dismissed the Yale professor, the Hudson River and the Chesapeake. ‘No educated man would condone such grammar.’

But when Mrs. Paxmore brought her new theory to her odd-job man, he visualized its application immediately. ‘It’s what happened!’ he said excitedly. ‘In the later years, when the ice had mostly melted, the river would begin to lose its force, and the ocean would creep in, and the river mouth would be drowned under the weight of salt water.’ It was a concept so intellectually beautiful, and so respondent to observable facts, that it seemed the clincher to previous speculations. He now saw the Susquehanna system in grand design, the remnant of a river which had once drained a major portion of an ice-laden continent, a majestic river which in the end had seen itself overcome by the ever-encroaching sea. He resolved to look into this matter further, when spring came.

Mrs. Paxmore, whose geography book had launched these speculations, pursued her own investigations, looking into all the books she could find and talking rather obsessively to those members of the community better informed than she. She was surprised one evening when her husband pushed back from the table and said, ‘Thee may have been
right, Elizabeth. I’ve been studying our bay … Well, I’ve been endeavoring to reconcile what I see with that interesting thesis thee propounded some weeks back. And the more I contemplate, the more I have to conclude that thee has hit upon something.’

He outlined the steps of this thinking: that if the ancient river had indeed been drowned, the resulting bay would be determined partly by the river and partly by the ocean, rather than entirely by the latter. This would mean that there ought to be an orderly progression from entirely fresh water at the mouth of the Susquehanna, where it debouched into the bay, to entirely salt water at the spot where the bay debouched into the sea. ‘And that’s what I find,’ he concluded. ‘Most interesting.’

‘Thomas Applegarth has been talking about making an expedition to the headwaters of the Susquehanna,’ she said. ‘I think we ought to help him.’

‘We could give him time off. Find some other handyman.’

‘I mean with money.’

George Paxmore formed his hands into a little cathedral and contemplated them for some time. Money wasn’t wasted on the Eastern Shore, least of all by a Quaker. His wife was making a serious proposal, but it was sensible. Knowledge must always be pursued. ‘I think we could let him have twenty-five dollars,’ he said.

‘Does thee want to tell him?’

‘I think thee should. It’s been thee who has encouraged him.’

Elizabeth decided that they should both inform their handyman that their family would like to support his scientific investigations to the extent of twenty-five dollars. He was unprepared for this bonanza and for some moments could not respond. Then he said, ‘I have fifteen of my own, and I can save at least twenty more by the end of February. I’d like to see the upper river before the snow has melted.’

So on the first of March, 1811, Thomas Applegarth, a farmer of Patamoke on the Eastern Shore, took off in a small sloop and headed for the present mouth of the Susquehanna River. The winds were not propitious, and he required three days to reach Havre de Grace. There he deposited his boat with the owner of a shipyard, and with sixty-three dollars in his pocket, started his exploration of the river.

For fifty cents he employed a man with a canoe to take him as far north as the turbulent rapids at Conowingo. At this point he allowed the canoeist to return home, while he struck out on foot along the left bank of the river, that is, the one to the east. Frequently he was forced to leave the river, for the going was too rough, and on some nights he slept quite a few miles inland from the banks.

But whenever he was able to walk alongside the river itself, or plunge into its icy waters for a cleansing bath, he felt himself to be in some mysterious way purified and closer to the secrets of the past. At the
infrequent ferries he would ask to help the rowers, spending whole days moving from shore to shore, so that by the time he reached the first important ferry at Columbia he was a practiced riverman.

But it was not until he had hiked past Harrisburg and got into the mountainous section of Pennsylvania that he began to see the evidences he sought. It was clear to him that in times past this mighty river had been ten or fifteen times as wide as it now was; proof existed in the flat, smooth benchlands stretching east and west from its banks. Surely they had once been the bed of that mighty, long-vanished stream which had carried away the waters of the melting ice. Each day was a revelation, a proof.

When he reached Sunbury, 215 miles from Patamoke, he faced a difficult decision, for north of that settlement were two Susquehanna Rivers. One would take him west to Williamsport, the other east to Wilkes-Barre, and no one whom he consulted could tell him definitely which was the senior river. To his amazement, no settler in Sunbury had explored to the headwaters of either.

‘Which throws the bigger body of water?’ he asked.

‘Come a flood, either does right smart,’ the most knowledgeable man replied.

‘If you were going to the headwaters, which branch would you take?’

‘I ain’t goin’.’

‘But which would you guess?’

‘It don’t concern me.’

He located a woman who said, ‘In times of freshet, the east branch seems to bring down the biggest trees—liken as if it had come the longest distance.’

‘Or it came through the most wooded land.’

‘I was takin’ that into my calculations,’ she said.

Since this was the only substantial evidence he had uncovered, he said, ‘That sounds sensible. I’ll go east.’

So on the last day of March, Applegarth started the long, difficult journey to Wilkes-Barre, and from there, north to the Indian settlement at Tunkhannock. The going was extremely rough; no boats were able to move upstream, and for long distances there was no road beside the river. For three days he struggled through uncut forests, determined to stay with the river, but in the end he had to abandon this resolve and move onto established roads, regardless of how far adrift they led him.

He felt as if he were exploring virgin land, and sometimes when he had been distant from the river for several days, he would come upon it rushing southward, and he would cry aloud with joy at having discovered an old friend: ‘There you are! Beautiful river, holder of secrets!’

He would take off his coat and shoes and step into the waters, and sometimes they would feel so enticing that he would plunge in, forgetful
of his clothes, then march along the riverbank until his pants and shirt dried on him. Occasionally he would ride with some farmer going to market; more often he walked alone, for days on end, always probing farther toward the source of his river.

On the long and winding stretch from Tunkhannock to Towanda, a distance of nearly forty miles as he wandered, he met no one, at times splashing his way right up the margins of the river in lieu of roads. He ate sparingly, an end of bread and some cheese, and lost seven pounds doing so. It was in this time of loneliness that he conceived his plan for putting on paper his reflections about the Susquehanna and its relation to the body of water he loved so strongly, the Chesapeake. He would spend whole days formulating a single passage, trying to make it sound important, like the reading he had done that winter. He sensed that there was a proper way to report an expedition: he must never claim too much; he must present his conclusions tentatively, so that others who came later could refute him if the facts they discovered were better than his. He was especially aware that he was dealing with conjecture, and he sensed that responsible men identify conjecture and differentiate it from fact.