Maryland [antikvár]

MEETING MARYLANDSunsets. They're intended to entrance us. The loveliest one I remember at Assateague Island had long bars of carmine light against an aquamarine sky. My favorite in Garrett County, at the other end of the state, was a crimson cone of light between two slate-blue mountains. Of course there's more to Maryland than sunsets. A mundane Maryland exists, with its inevitable deficiencies and difficulties, and it will have to be touched on from time to time in the text. But basically this book is a celebration of the beauty and vitality to be found throughout the state. Steve Uzzell has caught the essence of that beauty in his photographs; and in my introduction I've tried, in the course of surveying the state, to give a sense of that vitality.The lay of the land is famous: It's been hailed as "America in Miniature." The state geologist tells us that "America in Miniature" is slowly, very slowly, sinking beneath the sea; its richly variegated surface is giving way to water. But we don't have to worry. It'll need a million years, give or take a hundred thousand, for the ocean to rise high enough to reach from Assateague to Backbone Mountain in Garrett County. Yet the ocean's power is already attested by the three ancient rivers, one drowned and the other two drowning, that interlace the land in the eastern half of the state. Originally Chesapeake Bay was an extension of the Susquehanna River; today it's the Atlantic's largest inlet on the East Coast. The Potomac and the Patuxent are being overwhelmed also, starting with their estuaries.Meanwhile, the land above the water is divided into three different and noteworthy zones. The biggest is the Coastal Plain, occupying more than half of Maryland and stretching westward from the ocean's edge to the fall line. The fall line, where the hard rock of Appalachia meets the softer stone of the Coastal Plain, runs roughly parallel to the coast, from Washington to Baltimore to Elkton in the northeast corner of the state. The next zone is the Piedmont Plateau, whose pleasant terrain covers the middle of the state, from the fall line to the rim of the Appalachians. It's Maryland's heart-land. Last is the Appalachian area itself, which ends with Garrett County and abuts the mountainsof West Virginia and Pennsylvania.One more zone, important if anomalous, demands to be included. It's Chesapeake Bay. Once the most abundant source of seafood in the country, it still supplies many a dinner table. It also remains a broad highway for transportation. And it's a marvelous place to play, a source of recreation for all sorts of sailors in all sorts of pleasure-boats. Any way we look at it, there's nothing negligible about the Chesapeake. It's close to 200 miles long and covers an area within Maryland of more than 1,700 square miles.Early in Maryland's history each zone developed a characteristic way of life. Making a living came first, though there was of course much more to the way of life than that. To put it simply, the people of the Coastal Plain supported themselves, generation after generation, by growing tobacco and harvesting seafood; the people of the Piedmont earned their money by producing bumper crops of grain; and the people of Appalachia did mining and logging. Naturally, in Maryland's complex economy, changes were always taking place to a greater or lesser extent and for better or worse. However, they accelerated in several parts of the state with the coming of the twentieth century. The reasons could be found in a variety of circumstances ranging from the advent of the automobile to the exploitation of both land and water. The changes were social as well as economic.We might describe the general situation briefly, not only for its own sake but because it shows something about human nature especially on the two sides of the Chesapeake. To take the Coastal Plain first then, we see that the Chesapeake splits it down the middle. One part is the so-called Eastern Shore, so-called because it's far broader than a shore; the other part is the western shore, which is also far broader and so has been called in recent decades "Southern Maryland."The reactions of the opposing shores to economic conditions have been illuminating. Starting in colonial days the farmers on both shores had grown tobacco as if no other crop existed. The Eastern Shore even now has a reputation for rejecting change, and yet after the Civil War the farmers of the Eastern Shore gradually turned to the cultivation of very appetizing vegetables and fruits. While the profits from tobacco had shrunk with the passing of the decades, the profits from the vegetables and fruits were increasing. They could be sold either fresh or canned, and when the twentieth century started, Maryland led all the states in the canning of tomatoes and beans and came second only to California in the canning of fruits. On the other hand, the farmers of the western shore, though they weren't cut off from the rest of the state by the Bay as the Eastern Shoremen were, clung to tobacco. The men who bought the tobacco from them had many profitable years, right into the twentieth century, but the farmers themselves seldom made more than a meager living. Today farming in Southern Maryland is being crowded by the service industries, since much of the area is a dormitory for Washington and dormitories need services. However, some of the farmers are finding consolation in the fact that, even if there's little money in farming, there's a good deal in selling farm land to the real estate developers.The watermen, unlike the farmers, have had the same luck, good and bad, on both sides of the Bay. After the Civil War seafood harvesting continued to flourish; Chesapeake oysters were fea-