Chesapeake

Originally Published November 11, 2021

“Do you hear that sound?”  He had a satellite dish outside his RV, and watched the naval station.  “It’s the hovercraft.”  We rushed down to the dock.  There was a sunset, the hum of the large freighters, small fishermen returning to the dock, but no hovercraft.  We had heard sounds all day - pairs of F35’s, helicopters performing maneuvers just offshore, confounding looking planes flying low, and in the distance, an occasional sailboat would appear while a vapor trail scratched the sky.

Chesapeake Bay is a nexus of strategic, commercial significance. Every day a line of freighters sits outside the ports on inland side, a sign of the “supply chain” bottle neck.  One wonders how long they will wait for the results of the new infrastructure bill.  On the Del Marva Penninsula side, the consolidation of rail lines from New York and Philadelphia to ferries bringing one across the Bay to Virginia, and then on to Florida, were enormous, private ventures whose payoff was never fully realized, as the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel rendered the ferries, and to some extent the rail lines, obsolete, and a continual stream of trucks now easily crosses the bay. It was “disruption” twentieth century style.

Driving down the peninsula today, you see remnants of the earlier, pre-industrial landscape. There are intermittent cotton fields, long allayed driveways to retiring looking plantation houses, multiple small churches multiplied by denomination, class and other factors.  Between are gas stations, mini marts, boat dealers, fireworks shacks, cabins for rent, junk dealers and thrift shops.  It’s an economy struggling to catch a world passing it by at sixty miles an hour.

The sky here is larger, bluer and deeper as we head south.  Today when we went for our morning walk on the beach… there was the hovercraft.