Chesapeake Bay
One Sunday evening, after hosting us at their Silver Spring home, G.’s cousin and his family decided to drop us back at Arlington and make an outing of it. We took a massive detour to a beach that formed part of Chesapeake Bay. I remember vaguely that we touched Richmond and I was delighted to see the town that Booker T Washington had introduced me to in an English chapter from long ago. Isn’t it just fascinating to see names you’ve only read come to life, appear in shining silver letters on metal boards, there for you and for all to see, a sign that you’ve travelled (which is a luxury now, more than ever before) and are perhaps far from home?
There is a very real risk of disappointment when you actually encounter the places whose names have enamoured you. What I remember best about Silver Spring are shopping complexes; specifically, a large grocery store where I first learnt what chayote was and a furniture shop where we looked at dining tables for our cousins. Coniferous (?) trees arched above the perfect roads, casting a quiet, dark chill on them, perhaps the only thing that remotely hinted at bubbling, tinkling water.
In Arlington, we didn’t live far from the Shenandoah Mountains or the Appalachian Trail and oh, what images they conjured up in my head! I imagined staying in a mountain cabin, like Jack Kerouac in The Dharma Bums, with only mountain ridges as far as the eye could see, a bulb giving off watery light that weakly lit the mist that settled in every night. But when you’re reliant on public transport in the US, you gently padlock your imagination and take what you get, unless you are able to plan trips.
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On this occasion, when I found out that the beach we were going to was part of Chesapeake Bay, my heart soared. What a lovely word Chesapeake is, crisp and redolent of pine trees and a deep curving shore, with maybe a solitary pier? I hoped for an aching kind of beauty.
When we arrived at the beach, it was swarming with people. Somehow, my visions had left people out of the picture. So what I found eventually was a picnic spot, a green lawn dotted with tables leading to the sand and eventually, the water. It wasn’t a sea beach, but more like a lake. Cedars didn’t line the shore. The water didn’t splash up on the sand in noisy waves; it murmured and rippled instead, yielding bobbing heads and shoulders in the distance. The blue water went as far as the eye could see and over it was the bridge to Delaware, so you never felt like you were on the edge of the continent and could be tipped off land at any moment. Interestingly, a cruise liner also went by, muddling the lines between lake and sea. I wasn’t disappointed exactly, but it was no Bay of Bengal or English Channel or South China Sea. It had its own identity, one I needed time to comprehend and appreciate.
We picnicked too; we probably ate potato chips. We watched the sky lose its warm glow and jet trails grow luminescent. Unequipped with warm clothing and unused to pleasant weather, we shivered slightly. Then we bundled ourselves into the car for the drive back to our warm apartment and familiar food.
And now, years later, when my outings are restricted to our red-brick Madras terrace with concrete as far as the eye can see, I know what that endless blue marriage of freshwater and sea meant. I want to exchange my concrete trap for the open (if crowded) car park, the crows for the seagulls, and the static in my head for the chatter of picnic crowds. I contemplate on water and I dream of Chesapeake Bay. It is a place vastly changed, the old people replaced by new, but constant. More than anything, despite the additions, it is a place of peace, power, and sustenance. If you’re interested in the origin of the name, here are some guesses.
Because I’ve been relying heavily on my photos to bring that strange cool of a summer dusk and the lake/sea back to mind, let me show you two more for their name associations: one for its signboard (and implication of power?) nestled in a white sea, the other of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which has its own stories of an industrialising America to tell.
