Beautiful Maryland [antikvár]

The Maryland MixThe point of land is one of many that jut into the broad Potomac River from St.Mary's, Maryland's mother country.It is a thickly wooded point, its leafy green mass bordered by a narrow beach of glistening white sand. Only a few gnarled abstractions of sun-bleached driftwood bristle up from the wavelet-smoothed strand.The river at this point is only a few miles from its confluence with the storied Chesapeake Bay. It is wide and quiet here, and its waters lap the beach gently, as though the river is satisfied that it has nearly reached its destination.Over the soft rhythm of the wavelets' lapping can be heard the intermittent calls of gulls and land birds, the whisperings of breeze-stirred leaves and pine needles. Nowhere is there the sound of man . . . nowhere at all.In the distance a button of color pops over the horizon. Bright red and yellow, it balances lightly on the line that separates river from sky. Even at this distance, most observers would immediately recognize it as a spinnaker, a spinnaker that's no doubt pulling a yacht of no mean dimensions.But the romantic observerthat individual who can suspend his sense of time and let his imagination dancesuch an observer can see not a ballooning spinnaker, but, instead, the square, grey-white sails of the ship Ark, one of the two tiny vessels that deposited Maryland's founding colonists on these St. Mary's shores in 1635.The vision is really quite easy to conjure, for very little along this part of the Potomac has changed in Maryland's three and a half centuries of history.What's even more miraculous is this: the scene, the setting, are not unique. Spots of similar serenity, of similar changelessness, can be found along other St. Mary's points and coves.Miraculous?The non-Marylander has a right to be incredulousuntil he is informed that these calm, lovely, and seemingly timeless spots are only 50 miles as the seagull flies from Washington, D.C. They are even closer to the clover-leaves, parking lots,5