On June 2nd, we steered the Toyoter once more to
the Delmarva Peninsula, with our sights on the quaint Chesapeake town of St.
Michaels. It was here and nearby Easton
where James Michener holed up in the 1970s to research and write Chesapeake. Tucked
in a cove near the mouth of the Choptank River, St. Michaels is just a few oar
strokes from the fictitious Devon Island where much of Michener’s story was
centered.
The town might be better known, however, for the outstanding
Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum next to the boat harbor; and perhaps a little
lesser known as one Dick Cheney’s and Don Rumsfeld’s favorite haunts, which I
suppose makes the place, well, haunted.
Hey, c’mon, just kidding. Great
town, affable, walkable, shoppable, historical, photogenical, all the cool
things.
A kind interpreter at the museum gave us the lowdown on the
art and science of crabbing and oystering, while a stroll through the
boatbuilders’ woodshop had me contemplating the countless tons of sawdust,
chips, shavings and severed fingers* generated by the boatworks that employed
my dad during his own West Coast shipwrighting days in the 1950s. (*My dad kept all his fingers.)
When I said to someone , “Hey, didn’t Michener live here way
back when?”, a guy replied, “Yup, and I can tell you where he ate breakfast too.” He assured us ol’ James was a regular at a
former diner on Talbot Street that’s since morphed into a gift shop called The
Medicine Shoppe.
We wound up our visit chitchatting with a couple on a street
corner who were raffling off a classic Mustang convertible for a local
fundraiser, before wandering into the fish market for a jumbo crabcake that
Kris added to pasta when we arrived home that evening. Delicious.
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