Long Way Home (4 page)

“Do you have a kitchen at your motel?” Bill had read my mind.

“Just a microwave.”

“That'll work. No reason to drown your corn in too much water. I'll show you how.”

He cut off both ends of an ear with a butcher knife, and peeled away half the husk because it had been treated with pesticides. The kernels were small and white, and the silk was dry rather than wet—very fresh corn. No worms had got at it, either.

“Pop it in the microwave for two and a half minutes,” Bill went on. “A Chinese couple came by the other day, and I did up two ears for 'em like that. Sure enough, they asked for two more.”

Next we talked about soybeans and ate some edamame. Talbot County seemed in good shape compared to Caroline, I thought, and Bill agreed that was probably true, although some farmers were struggling.

“We've been lucky,” he said, recalling last year's floods in Texas and how Hurricane Gustav had trashed Louisiana this past August. “We haven't had any of those natural disasters.”

That's how Bill Eason viewed the world, through the prism of nature. The Dow Jones and the NASDAQ barely impinged upon his mind. Such security as he had was tied to the earth and its seasons, and though that could be risky, it was still safer and saner than being a prisoner to the stock market.

Bill put my cantaloupe and four ears of corn in a paper bag, and gently laid the tomatoes on top, then wrote his address in my notebook so I could send him a book when I finally quit traveling and got around to writing it.

THOUGH I'VE BEEN
fortunate enough to eat at a restaurant or two with a Michelin star, I doubt any chef could surpass the meal I fixed late that afternoon. As instructed by Bill Eason, I stripped an ear of corn, popped it into the microwave, set the timer, and stood back, certain the ear would blow up and send a shower of scorched kernels across the room. It came out piping hot and cooked to perfection instead, so I sliced an heirloom tomato on a paper plate and sprinkled it with the sea salt and pepper I'd bought in Oxford.

I'd also splurged on a good bottle of Chablis. After pouring a chilled glass, I sat at a desk—my “business center,” in motel-speak—and dug in. The corn was sweet and tender, and the tomato juice ran down my chin. For dessert, I split the cantaloupe into quarters and ate it with my hands, right down to the rind. Motels always have too many mirrors, so I couldn't avoid seeing the dopey grin on my face.

IN THE EARLY
evening, I followed the crooked course of the Choptank to Secretary, where it swings roughly west toward Cambridge and Todd Point above Cornersville to join the Chesapeake. A concrete bridge over the river, built during the Depression but now defunct, had come back to life as a fishing pier that's open around the clock all year. Anglers catch perch, hard heads, catfish, sea trout, and crabs.

In 1960, the year of Steinbeck's journey, Cambridge was fiercely redneck and racist to the core. African Americans, fully a third of the population, were confined to the rundown Second Ward ghetto. The schools were segregated, and blacks were casually deprived of their rights. With jobs at a premium—29 percent of the blacks were unemployed, as were 7 percent of the whites, quite high for Maryland then—Cambridge amounted to a disaster waiting to happen.

The showdown occurred in 1963. For the previous two years, local African-American activists and their supporters, branded as “outside agitators,” had staged sit-ins and demonstrations to the chagrin of elected officials. That July eleven protesters attempted to enter Dizzyland, a café whose owner, Robert Fehsenfeld, was a rabid segregationist.

Fehsenfeld blocked the door and shouted curses. When the protesters knelt on the sidewalk to pray and sing, he kicked them, carried one woman away, and smashed an egg on the head of a white youth involved, while onlookers hooted in approval. The police, all white, refused to intervene.

The protesters returned to Dizzyland later that week. This time Fehsenfeld stood aside and let them pass.

“You're not wanted here!” he cried. “Understand, you come here at your own risk.”

Then he locked the door behind them. Twelve white thugs were waiting inside, and they beat the protesters to a pulp.

Mobs from both camps ranged around town through the night, leaving seven white men wounded. For the second time that month, the governor called in the National Guard, whose soldiers shut down the bars in Cambridge and enforced a nine-o'clock curfew. The Guard would act as an occupying army for more than a year.

Four years later, Cambridge still hadn't healed. When H. Rap Brown of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee urged an angry black crowd to “burn this town down if it don't turn around,” an assailant wounded him with a shotgun. The town did begin to turn around at last, however slowly, and it's almost evenly divided between the races now and harmonious enough for them to gather together on occasion.

They were doing so at Sailwinds Park that evening, in fact, where Crabtoberfest was going on—a big civic party that combined an affection for the Chesapeake's blue crabs with the sudsy ardor of Munich in early autumn. It did no good to ask what had inspired the odd union. Nobody I talked with seemed to know or care because there was so much food and drink around.

You could hang out at a
biergarten
inside an auditorium and gorge on sauerbraten, sausages, braised pork ribs, dumplings, spaetzle, and Paulaner or Dogfish Head beer, but if your lederhosen already felt a little tight, you could skip the Bavarian feast and buy a bucket of steamed crabs and corn for ten dollars as I did, joining some other revelers at a paper-covered table under a canopy.

“You ready to crack 'em?” inquired an amiable guy who had a fair bit of crab on his shirt.

“I think so. We've got Dungeness crabs in California.”

“No crab like the blue crab. Bring one outta the bucket.” I brought out a hefty specimen, and he gave it a brief physical exam. “What we're looking at here is a jimmy. That's a boy crab. See the tips of those claws? All plain? On a lady crab, they's painted red.”

“That's good to know.”

“Go on and start.” He handed back the crab. “Don't be afraid to make a mess.”

I made an excellent mess. I broke off the crab's claws and legs, then turned it over and loosened the apron with a knife, scraping away the gills and mustard and forking in the meat. I snapped open the legs and busted the claws with a wooden mallet. The shell fragments flew, but no one objected. We were all very messy by now. I'd certainly had a memorable day in the eating department.

A school bus pulled up at the auditorium, causing a commotion. Down the steps came a troupe of African Americans between the ages of eight and eighteen or so. The girls and women wore satin dresses in rose and black, with red tassels around their ankles, while the young men were in red T-shirts and black slacks.

As precisely as a drill team, the troupe marched inside and took up a position in front of a stage, where two men shouldered harnesses fitted with four snare drums. At a signal from their leader, they proceeded to rock the joint, laying down a thundering backbeat.

The dancers moved in synchronized fashion and looked radiant and full of joy. They were athletes, really, and their routine called every muscle into play. They stomped their feet, raised their eyes toward the heavens, and smiled at what they saw there. Here was the gospel spirit in action. The troubles of the 1960s seemed very far away, and America not such a bad place after all.

In an elevated mood, I left Crabtoberfest and promptly got lost. My eventual rescuers stood outside a church, seven women and a silver-haired gent. They'd just left a discussion group, where the subject may well have been how to help unfortunates like me, and they were glad to do a good deed.

“You were lost,” the gent laughed. “And now you're found.”

When I recognized the road to Easton and Oxford, I celebrated with a nightcap at The Portside, a cozy restaurant on the water. I met a boat builder there, who also operated a charter service and had “loaded up” some clients with snappers, or small bluefish, that morning. He claimed to have an accent unique to the Eastern Shore derived from the English of Shakespeare, and he described it as Elizabethan.

On Smith Island in Chesapeake Bay, where colonists from Cornwall and Wales arrived in the 1600s, you can reportedly hear traces of a West County dialect, so I pursued the conversation, but the builder and a friend were now weighing the potential drawbacks of dating a recently divorced woman—dealing with the threats from her violent ex-husband, for example.

“I'd say go for it,” the Elizabethan told his pal. “He's probably just a bullshitter.”

“What if he isn't?”

“You'll be the first to know.”

AMERICA LOST ITS
luster the next morning. The price of my room included a free breakfast of rock-hard bagels, calorie-rich muffins, anachronistic slabs of Wonder Bread, and syrupy fruit salad from a can. As I surveyed the dreadful buffet, I cursed myself for being so greedy and devouring Bill Eason's whole damn cantaloupe instead of saving half for just such an emergency.

Another humid, drizzly morning. St. Michaels, west of Easton, was dozing that Sunday, its curio shops and boutiques still closed. Route 33 wrapped itself around McDaniel, Wittman, and Sherwood, and ran through large flat tracts studded with oaks and loblolly pines. A drawbridge over Knapps Narrows led to Tilghman Island. With a land mass of only 2.7 square miles, the island seemed about to be swallowed by the advances of the Choptank and the Chesapeake.

Here, too, the oyster trade once flourished. When Captain John Smith charted the area in 1608, the Powhatans could wade into the bay and pick them by hand, but the newcomers soon depleted those stocks and moved offshore in log canoes, where the watermen relied on long, heavy tongs to get at the beds. The work was brutal and the results unpredictable. Often each pass, or “lick,” yielded just a few keepers.

All that changed with the introduction of the dredge—a wire basket, raised or lowered with a winch, that efficiently dislodged and scooped up the oysters. Dredging caused such severe damage that Maryland banned it from 1820 to 1864, only relenting after a strict new set of regulations was in place. A dredge could be operated only under sail now, thereby reducing the negative impact.

At the peak of the Chesapeake's oyster bounty in the 1890s, the sailing vessel of choice was the skipjack, light and fast, with a single mast and a v-shaped hull ideal for maneuvering in the shallows. It took no special skill to build one. Even an ordinary carpenter could do it. About two thousand skipjacks were on the bay at the turn of the century, but they were gradually abandoned, destroyed, or fell to disrepair as the oyster stocks dwindled.

Only about thirty or so skipjacks remain, and those still going after oysters—the last commercial sailing powered fleet in North America—are berthed at Dogtown Harbor. Two watermen were leaning against a pick-up there, nursing cans of Bud and trying to regain the momentum they'd lost at a tiki bar the night before.

At first they waved me away, too hungover to answer any questions from a stranger. Who could blame them? Their lives are tough even in a good year. Though a waterman may own a boat, he often needs a second job to pay the bills. Hand tonging is still the primary method of harvesting and no less taxing. The beds are no less depleted.

“So you want to know about skipjacks?” one of the men reconsidered, shouting to me as I roamed.

I walked back to the truck. “Any here now?”

“The
Kathryn
. Come on, I'll show you.”

The
Kathyrn
, sleek as can be, dates from 1901. Fifty feet long, she carries a crew of six to handle the dredging, cull the oysters, and tend the sails. On Mondays and Tuesdays in season, the skipjacks can use a motorized yawl to push them around if there isn't sufficient wind. (Most skipjacks operate only on power days, in fact.) The limit on oysters is 150 bushels a day, but they rarely meet it.

Oysters are odd creatures—protrandric, in the language of zoologists. They spawn the first year as males, then grow bigger and more energetic and release eggs as a female after that. The largest and toughest are called “counts.” Only the most ardent aficionado dares to swallow them raw. Counts are best in stews, while selects are smaller and second-best. Standards are the smallest and most valuable of all.

It's easy to get lost in the lore of the Eastern Shore, an unusual spot that strikes a delicate balance between satisfying the tourists and sustaining the locals. The watermen may be under pressure, but they won't just disappear. When a man loves what he does and thrives on being independent, he won't surrender the thing that gives him meaning without a fight. The maverick streak may be dying out in American life, although not at Dogtown Harbor.

From the harbor, I drove to Neavitt at the tip of a peninsula between Bellevue and Tilghman Island. The road ended at a marina, where all was incredibly still. Only the minute splashes of silvery baitfish broke the surface calm. The Choptank looked imperturbable, an aspect of the eternal. I watched it do nothing, as entranced as one of Melville's water gazers.

“Posted like silent sentinels all around town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries,” the master wrote.

The
Northern Star
from Neavitt and the
Holy Mackerel
from Deale, both fishing boats, were docked at the marina. They'd been swabbed down, and were spit-clean and ready for their next voyage. A lanky youth touched up the paint on another boat, saluting me with his brush.

“It's been fair of late,” he said, regarding the catch. “Anyway, we're surviving.”

R
ED EYE'S DOCK
BAR
on Kent Island Narrows can be dangerous on a warm Sunday afternoon. In no hurry to cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, I dallied there on my way to Virginia. The urban sprawl of greater Washington, D.C., lay on the other side, depicted in my atlas as an agonized orange blob. Though I'd vowed like Steinbeck to avoid major cities, U.S. 50 bisected the capital, so I left the highway for Mears Point Marina to postpone the drive, not knowing what I'd find there.

What I found was Red Eye's. Forget about Maryland—I'd made a detour to Key West. Surfboards and trophy billfish decorated the open-air bar. You could practically reach out and touch the bay. The marina, with about five hundred slips, supplied a steady stream of thirsty boaters, but landlubbers also were welcome. Sports fans hunkered before the TVs, fixed on football and the Mets' last game of the season. They needed to beat the Marlins to win a wild-card slot and didn't, deflating the hopes I'd built up in Manhattan.

The all-American scent of red meat sizzling on a barbecue wafted from a food stand. On a little stage, some musicians fiddled with their guitars and amps, tuning up for a gig. The Fourth of July had been enshrined in perpetuity at Red Eye's, but there'd be no bikini contest today, the bartender apologized as he collected my empty beer bottle.

“They already held the championship,” he moped.

“Who won?”

“The blonde.”

“Some things never change.”

“You want another?”

“I do, but I won't.”

The Chesapeake looked stunning from the bridge. You'd never guess how polluted it is, a huge dumping ground for the nitrogen, phosphorus, sediment, and chemicals that wash into it from car emissions, fertilizer, manure, and treated wastewater, causing algae blooms that deprive the blue crabs and oysters of oxygen. In effect, they're suffocating.

The bay's stewards projected that the Chesapeake might hold as many as 200 million crabs of spawning age in 2008, but the tally came to just 120 million. Oysters are even more endangered, barely viable now. Pity the poor shellfish and the watermen. The country's biggest estuary is slowly being poisoned, but it's tough to point a finger from behind the wheel of a car.

Past Annapolis, I geared up for the challenge of Washington's tangled streets. I'd spent time there before, and felt educated when I departed. Every American should visit the district at least once, if only to demystify it. It's ennobling to tour such monuments as the Lincoln Memorial, as corny as it sounds. They instill a tremor of idealism, however momentary, and remind us how far we've drifted from the infant dreams of the Republic.

Soon Washington sucked me into its vortex. In rural areas, you can motor along and daydream, but an unfamiliar city kicks you in the shins and wakes you up. It's easy to get confused. My route through D.C. looked so clear on the map I never gave it a second thought. U.S. 50 turned into New York Avenue, then glided by the White House and over a bridge on the Potomac.

Nothing could be simpler. That's what we tell ourselves, full of false bravado, even when we know better. Nothing could be simpler—the sentence should be struck from the English language.

For the next hour or so, I became an accidental sightseer. Lost again, I saw such awe-inspiring wonders as the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Passport Office before I crossed into Virginia on Interstate 66, not U.S. 50. The calm of Neavitt seemed very far away.

Of the many suburbs where I might spend the night, I chose Falls Church. The name was more idyllic than Tyler Park, and less cute than Sleepy Hollow. The church in question once stood on a main road to the Great Falls of the Potomac, where the river flows through a gorge and drops seventy-six feet in less than a mile.

Too tired to be picky, I checked into the first motel I passed on the Arlington Pike. A Vietnamese cultural society's annual luncheon had just concluded there, and the guests still lingered in the lobby. The men wore dark business suits, while the women were graciously attired, some in traditional dress, and the children were noticeably well mannered.

As opposed to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, this was a sight that cheered me up. Falls Church, an extraordinary melting pot, renewed my always tentative faith in the American experiment. The northern Virginia phone book listed thirty-one restaurants advertising pho as a specialty, for instance, and Eden Center Mall catered almost exclusively to the Vietnamese.

On my evening stroll, I passed a kebab parlor that split its space with a Salvadoran taqueria serving “delicious pupusas.” El Tutumaso, a Bolivian café, competed from an adjacent strip mall. About forty thousand Bolivians live within a few miles of each other between Falls Church and Arlington, and they frequently own small businesses, including Italian restaurants.

Cecilia's sells pizzas by day, but it's a disco by night that sometimes features famous entertainers imported from La Paz. While you can order pasta at Tutto Bene, the
salteña
is an off-the-menu item—Bolivia's empanada stuffed with chicken or beef and a soupy sauce of raisins, peas, potatoes, olives, and eggs. Tutto Bene sells about three thousand every week.

PISTONE'S ITALIAN INN
has been around too long for the Bolivians to be involved. It enshrines the spirit of the 1950s and sits on a little hill above the Arlington Pike, with an agreeable terrace for outdoor dining.

The Sunday Jam, with Art Beverage tinkling the ivories, hit its stride when I entered. A three-piece combo launched into a killer version of “They Call the Wind Maria,” and you could feel the ghost of Old Blue Eyes snapping his fingers to the beat and asking for another double on the rocks.

Portraits in oil lined a wall in the intimate, horseshoe-shaped bar, perhaps dear departed Pistones, or maybe treasured regulars who'd run up a record tab. Most regulars that night had left their youth behind years ago, but they still conveyed its lively, robust energy.

Clifford Dewey qualified as the life of the party. He often drives over from Bethesda, Maryland, in the white Lincoln Town Car he calls the Tuna Boat. An outrageous flirt, Dewey was quick with a quip or a slap on the back. The gals doted on him. Sinatra would have approved.

“Having a good time?” he asked as I sat down, and before I could answer he bragged, “I've never had a bad time in my life.”

The bartender poured me the biggest glass of Chardonnay I'd ever seen. I could have been drinking from a goldfish bowl. That was in keeping with the charm of Pistone's—flamboyant, letting it all hang out. After the combo played the last notes of “Maria,” a demure woman released her inner self, bloomed into a chanteuse, grabbed the mike, and belted out an anthemic “Mack the Knife.” Anybody can sing at the Sunday Jam, whether or not they can carry a tune.

“I'll be singing in the parking lot on the thirty-second of October,” Clifford Dewey whispered, his eyes twinkling. “Get it?”

I did get it, and we began to talk. Dewey's business card read
C. D. Dewey & Associates
,
International Financing
, so I assumed he'd be an expert on the economy and our prospects for the future.

“They're frightening,” he responded, but his tone wasn't pessimistic. Instead he took the long view. He meant frighteningly positive. The country had weathered such turmoil before, he pointed out—the Depression, of course, and also the big stock market dip in the 1990s. He believed that we'd recover in due time. As a self-made man, he trusted in the potential of human beings to better themselves if they're given half a chance.

Dewey reeled off his autobiography for me. His was a success story stamped with the imprimatur
Only in America
.

“I'm lucky,” he said modestly. “The Good Lord gave me a shitload of brains and an elephant's memory. I had one of the top IQs at my high school in Massachusetts and the lowest grades. I didn't even graduate. I started pumping gas at sixteen.”

He joined the navy to escape his fate as a pump jockey, then took a job as an auto mechanic on his return and ascended the company ladder, eventually signing up as a parts salesman. He rose to the rank of general manager at twenty-five, and when the firm cashed out as a franchise, so did Dewey. He received about a quarter of a million dollars in 1985 and built up a portfolio of investment properties. He still had a finger in many pies, including some real estate in Dubai.

Though he felt confident about a recovery, he did admit to transferring some of his assets to an FDIC-insured bank. It was the working people who were most at risk in the current climate, he thought. If you had only a paycheck and no savings to depend on, you were terribly vulnerable.

When a waiter set a slab of lasagna before Dewey, he urged me to try it, but I begged off. It was almost the size of home plate, too rich and heavy after a rough day of travel, so I cast my lot with the Bolivians instead—proof of how little I knew about Bolivia's cuisine.

Evo Morales wasn't at Tutumaso that evening, but his distant cousin might have been tucking into a plate of
pique lo macho
(steak, sausages, onions, tomatoes, and peppers served over french fries) or
silpancho
(breaded beef fried and mixed with potatoes and rice). Family groups, young and old, were convened at most tables. Kids dashed around the room and hid in corners, while the teenagers watched videos of Bolivian hip-hop. The atmosphere was warm, gentle, and loving.

As the only gringo in the room, I attracted some friendly glances. After studying the photos on the menu, I ordered
charque
, a dish that dwarfed Pistone's lasagna. It consisted of shredded dried beef, posole, boiled potatoes, and hard-boiled eggs, and came with
llajua
, a bright green hot sauce I should have used with more restraint instead of demonstrating my new fondness for all things Bolivian.

Here was an America I could believe in, Clifford Dewey's land of opportunity come to life. Someday a boy or girl at El Tutumaso, rescued from poverty's extremes, might have an identical success story to tell. Immigrants are essential to the nation, reinvigorating its most basic principles. Our edge in innovation would suffer without their input. Half the doctorates awarded in the United States would go to foreign students in 2010.

At the most basic level, of course, immigrants do the work Americans turn down, vividly demonstrated in Cambridge, where the crab-packing houses were short of hands. Ordinarily, they depend on H2B laborers from abroad, who hold special visas for temporary, seasonal, nonagricultural jobs.

Only sixty-six thousand such visas were granted in 2008, though, and the laborers had all been hired by the time the crabs were ready, so the packers held a job fair and hoped to find three hundred replacements. Even in a deep recession, just fifteen applicants showed up.

BREAKFAST AT
Eden Center Mall, already buzzing at nine-thirty. A sleek-haired dandy, vaguely sinister, banged away at a pinball machine, while Saigon techno pop bounced off the walls at Café Dang. Elsewhere wizened men, close contemporaries of Tomoji Tanabe, brooded and stroked their chins over chess boards, ignoring the activity around them.

Two boys struggled to tote a twenty-pound sack of rice from a market to their mother's car. A hesitant woman peered at the gowns in the window at Ha Van Bridal, a look of intense concentration on her face, maybe pondering her future. To commit or not to commit? There were many jewelry stores for choosing wedding bands, and also hair salons, an herbalist, and a moneylender.

At a bakery, I ate a croissant and drank Vietnamese coffee, a strong, dark roast filtered and blended with sweetened condensed milk, and asked for a
banh mi
sandwich to go. The counter girl sliced a crusty baguette in half and layered it with barbecued pork, then added tomatoes, cucumbers, pickled carrots, shredded daikon, and sprigs of cilantro.

“Jalapeños?”

“Yes, please.”

She wrapped it neatly and put it in a paper sack. I had to stay my hand from unwrapping it on the spot. Lunch, my eye. That sandwich probably wouldn't last until noon.

Leaving Eden Center, I found U.S. 50 again, a miracle of sorts. The highway rolled by Chantilly and away from that dense orange hazard zone in my atlas. I was traveling through Loudon County now, the fourth-fastest growing in America and also the wealthiest, with a median household income of about $107,000. The heavy hitters often worked for high-tech or Internet-related companies. The county's motto, “I Byde My Time,” might still apply to the horse farms and vineyards around Leesburg and Bluemont, but the rest of Loudon had been dragged inside the commuter rim.

Loudon County does still have a few open tracts of land. Near Aldie, I blinked at what appeared to be a fortified compound for gnomes. Several small white houses—the size of outhouses, really—with red corrugated roofs and two square windows like eyes were perched on an almost treeless hillside. A wooden guard tower hovered in the rear, tall enough to grant the little person on duty a 360-degree view of the area.

This was Pev's Paintball Park, a forty-eight-acre parcel with fourteen playing fields. Its founder, Mike Peverill, owns the largest chain of “paintball only” stores in the country. On a busy weekend, the park accommodates up to 250 players intent on annihilating each other. Corporate groups sometimes reserve Pev's as a tool for letting their employees vent their frustrations and resolve their disputes.

The square-jawed jock in charge of Pev's shared this with me. He was a recent college grad, bored and biding his time until the next move revealed itself.

“It's slow during the week now,” he said. “The kids are back in school.”

“Do you get a lot of children?”

“Sure do. They use the park for birthday parties. We do bachelor parties, too. And bachelorettes.”

Here was a new cultural twist. Apparently a groom-to-be required more than a surfeit of cocktails and a lap dance before he faced the altar. He needed to be shot with a ball of paint.