February 28, 2013

• Red Bridges

       A few days ago, I had to go over and do some work on the water heater at my mom's cottage, and since I had the day off and had brought the camera in case inspiration struck, I thought I'd go home the long way, through the small town where I spent most of my childhood.  From the time I was three, til my thirteenth year, we lived in this house on the edge of Greensboro, a little, one stoplight town on the eastern shore of Maryland.  "Eastern shore" describes the parts of Maryland and Virginia east of the Chesapeake Bay.  Since Delaware is entirely east of the bay, it is not included except when the area is referred to in its entirety as the DelMarVa Peninsula.  

  

      It was designed and built for an egg farmer named Nagel, and has many interesting idiosyncrasies.  For instance, the rooms on each floor were 1' 1" shorter than those on the floor below, 10'2" on the first story, 9'1" on the second, and 8' on the third. It had 11 bedrooms, library, huge foyer with a massive, rare, rectangular grand piano,  living room in the shape of an egg, huge dining room and a large kitchen with an attached back room.  Because of the cost of heating with the old radiator heat, we only heated the kitchen with a wood stove unless there was company, and so lived mainly in that room until summer.  I remember rushing down to get dressed in the morning by the fire.  It was condemned when we bought it and had seen service at various times as a hospital for war wounded and as a nursing home. I'm remembering many stories about that house, but they are for another post.

      When I was thirteen, my parents moved us out to five acres at the junction of a stream and the Choptank River.  The Choptank is on the left in this picture and the stream on the right, both flowing to the right of the frame.

  

      One of our neighbors was an unfriendly farmer who let us know in no uncertain terms that we were not to dare step foot on his property.  His property started just a bit to the right of the rivulet which dumped its water into the river through the clay banks.  This man set out bear traps around an enclosure full of pheasants in order to lure our dogs off our property onto his, because it angered him that they ran free on ours.  Wow dark memories, I'd forgotten.

  

        On the other side was the lady who had sold us our property and who allowed us free run of hers, thus doubling our already large playground.  The best part, though, was that the other side of the river was a small, 70 acre state park, enlarging our territory to 80 acres.  This was Red Bridges.  There were, at the time, two bridges, but I'm not sure why they were called Red Bridges.  In the time since, the bridges have been removed, and the dirt road from one direction closed.  Here is the location of the more prominent of the old bridges.

  

      We spent many summer afternoons putting inner tubes or the old john boat in the water above the waterfall and riding over, only to pull it out of the water carry it back up the shore and ride again.

    We would pull out at a concrete slab ramp, that more likely than not on any given summer night or weekend would be seeing double use as a car wash.  People would bring fishing poles or picnic dinners and hang out and play until a car pulled away from the ramp, and it was their turn to pull out the dish soap, buckets and rags, and clean their car. 

     

       Many times, the state would put barbeques and picnic tables out for public use, but they would always get taken during the night.  The tables became heavier, then chained down and the barbeques sunk in concrete, but one night you'd hear a bunch of loud voices and engines and you'd know the local kids or drunk men acting like kids had used their 4X4s to pull up the latest ones, and the picnics would be on the ground for the rest of the summer.  It looks like times have changed, because there were some nice concrete picnic tables with some apparent age scattered around the park when I visited this time.

  

        Where the bridges used to be, the USGS has erected some sort of tower and pulley system, though I'm not sure of its purpose.

   

       Wet, mossy roots, always made walking (or more likely for us, running) a treacherous exercise.

  

       Small ponds, formed when the waters of the last big rain or snowmelt had receded, were fun places to look for signs of whatever had been unlucky enough to stay a little too long. Most of the time, there would be just tadpoles or minnows, but every so often, we'd find a fish.

  

       I can remember running out to the river every afternoon in winter with an axe, to chop away at the ice and see if it had reached the 8" thickness required before we were allowed to skate. In springtime, when the dogwoods bloomed, the herring would spawn, and run so thickly you could snag them just by throwing out an unbaited line and reeling it in, or by holding a dipnet in the water until several fish just swam right in.  The water would sparkle and flash in the shallow spots, as schools of herring turned this way and that and reflected the sunlight off their shiny sides.  We would catch large numbers of them and use them for fertilizer for the garden.  A few weeks later, if the weather was just so, the perch would run and we'd have several more weeks of excellent fishing for a fish we could actually eat.

      It's amazing, the memories you dredge up as you visit places from your past.   

  • 9:46 pm
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