Long Way Home (3 page)

Kennedy's media corps put Nixon's to shame, though, and turned a gaffe of Eisenhower's into a debilitating TV ad. Asked at a press conference to list some helpful suggestions his vice president had supplied, Ike quipped, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.” In other ads, Jackie Kennedy addressed some Latino voters in Spanish, while Harry Belafonte, speaking as “a Negro and an American,” touted JFK as the next FDR. If elected, Kennedy vowed not to take any orders from the pope.

Even race played a significant role in '60, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested during a sit-in at an Atlanta department store about three weeks before the balloting. A cracker judge sentenced King to four months of hard labor on a technicality, and dispatched him in secret to a Georgia penitentiary, where his supporters feared he'd be lynched.

When Kennedy heard about the situation, he called King's wife to offer his support, and asked his brother Bobby to step in. With the intervention of a New York judge, Bobby managed to free King on bail, and Dr. Martin Luther King Sr. switched parties in gratitude, thanking Kennedy for wiping the tears from his daughter-in-law's eyes.

“I've got a suitcase full of votes,” he said, “and I'm going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.” Some historians credit those votes with deciding the election, the closest of the twentieth century.

Moths fluttered around the screened porches of old Dover as I set out to find a bar. At Irish Mike's Old Towne Pub, the crowd had chosen a football game over McCain-Obama, so I ducked into McGlynns Pub across the way, only to find a reality show on the tube. J.W.'s Sports Bar lived up to its name, and the Lobby House, the last saloon within walking distance of the motel, had opted for music videos.

In the end, I watched the debate in my room. I felt frustrated, but maybe I shouldn't have. John Steinbeck had insisted that strangers wouldn't discuss politics openly, and maybe I should have heeded him. Americans only talked about such harmless topics as baseball and hunting, he argued, but it could also be that Doverites needed no further prodding. With a black population of almost 20 percent and Joe Biden, a native son, on the ticket, Delaware might already have cast its lot with the Democrats.

ON SATURDAY MORNING,
the parking lots at Dover's malls began to fill up shortly after nine o'clock, but the Office Depot where I needed to buy a memory stick wouldn't open until ten, so I sat in the car and listened to callers chew over the debate on the radio. America may have a budget deficit, but there's no shortage of hot air.

Apparently Barack Obama was a Muslim and a socialist who intended to redistribute the wealth by stealing from the rich to aid the poor, or so the cranks insisted. Robin Hood wouldn't stand a chance with this bunch. They'd have praised the sheriff of Nottingham for being a fiscal conservative.

Talk radio was inescapable wherever I traveled. All across the country, the same absurdities were recycled daily. Preaching to the converted had become a lucrative industry, and the most successful hosts, whether on the left or the right, often played fast and loose with the facts. In an earlier century, they'd have been selling snake oil. Bald-faced liars earned seven-figure salaries by perversely stirring the pot of discontent.

When the callers grew too nasty to be funny, I killed some time at Dover Downs, the very casino I meant to avoid. I needn't have worried. I have no taste for the slots, and the virtual blackjack dealers failed to seduce me—alien beings born of computer graphics and physically perfect, too, above all the women showing off their creamy cleavage. In the wee hours, broken-hearted losers had fallen for them. I knew it in my bones.

From Dover, my mission accomplished, I drove west through Rising Sun and Canterbury toward Denton and U.S. 50. The cloud cover was thick again, with more rain in the forecast. At the aptly named Marydel, a mere speck, I bid farewell to Delaware and crossed into Caroline County, where the residents have the lowest per capita income in Maryland. The farmers scratch out a living on corn, strawberries, and chickens.

This was sleepy territory, a landscape of flags and churches, manufactured homes and battered pickups. At a convenience store in Henderson, burly guys carried out twelve-packs of Bud Light and Coors Light, although they clearly weren't watching their weight. The smattering of signs around supported John McCain.

Somebody with a sense of humor once christened Goldsboro the “Hub of the Universe,” because three highways converge there. It's actually a poor little town with a feed store, a hardware store, and not much else except religion.

Faith seems to sink its roots readily into the fertile soil of such spots, where the promise of an afterlife may carry the sweet balm of relief for people enduring the trials of the present. One house—broken shingles, tarpaper backing exposed, paint flaking from the windowsills—advertised a business called Heaven Sent Books.

Another sign, this for Christian Park in Greensboro. The biblical fervor was so heated in Caroline County I thought it might be a theme park with David slaying Goliath on the hour, but it was a plain old municipal facility on the Choptank River, a major tributary of Chesapeake Bay.

As I followed a dirt road into the woods, a white-tailed doe darted in front of the car, with four fawns bounding along behind her. Sleek, elegant, and so graceful their hooves scarcely touched the ground, you could almost imagine the deer taking flight. The road guttered out in a clearing by the Choptank, not yet tidal in its upper reaches and quite shallow in early autumn, flowing over a pebbly streambed. From the trees came the trilling of birds.

Joe and Paula Talley, a middle-aged couple, stood in the river fully clothed. They wore T-shirts and sneakers, although Joe favored jeans instead of shorts. He sported a beard and a ballcap and held a long white instrument that resembled a weed whacker, gliding it over the Choptank an inch or so above the water. Paula bent to sift through the pebbles, grabbing a handful and then dropping them back.

The Talleys might have been prospecting for gold if Maryland had any, but that wasn't far wrong. They were on a treasure hunt, so intent and focused I tried not to disturb them. Instead I studied the river, very happy in the moment as I always am beside a stream. The Choptank ran swiftly enough to hold trout, although it might be too warm or a tiny bit brackish, so when Joe Talley glanced up I asked my usual question.

“It fishes real well in the spring,” he said, tipping back his cap. “You can catch largemouth bass and white perch. And sunfish, of course.” He'd grown up nearby and used to swim in the Choptank as a boy.

“What's that gadget you've got?”

“A metal detector. It's my new hobby.”

“Are you finding anything?”

He opened the palm of a hand—three pennies and a slew of pop-tops. “We did better at the ballpark. Over there we made seventy-five cents.”

Joe found it easy to laugh at himself. He'd probably squeeze an ounce of mirth from almost any situation, even the blackest. Looking silly was the least of his worries. Paula had just been laid off by an electronics firm after twenty-three years, and the Talleys were in a pinch. They tried not to be bitter about it. Most of Caroline County was feeling the pain.

The downturn didn't surprise Joe. He'd seen it coming. Americans were too spoiled, he thought. They'd had it too easy for too long.

“Did you watch the debate last night, Joe?”

“Just the highlights. I'm tired of the whole political process. It goes on forever now.”

“Joe refuses to vote,” Paula needled her husband. “So he shouldn't be allowed to complain.”

“What about the economy?”

“It sucks!” Joe bellowed, although this, too, seemed to amuse him. He appeared ready to meet any calamity head-on and grapple it to the mat.

Paula leaned toward the Democrats, but she was no wide-eyed believer in Barack Obama as a magical cure for the nation's ills. “Whoever becomes president won't be able to do much,” she offered. “Not for a while, anyway.”

DENTON, MARYLAND, HAS
an explosive history. It rose from the ashes—literally—after a company of Union soldiers, celebrating the Fourth of July in 1863, set off some skyrockets and other fireworks and burned it down. It lies on a wider, deeper stretch of the Choptank, dredged to make it navigable.

Ships once departed for Baltimore from Joppa Wharf bearing a cargo of tomatoes and watermelons, and returned with fertilizer, bricks, and oyster shells for paving roads. The main market, rooted in the center of town, sold farm produce and slaves.

The recession had hit Denton hard. In most neighborhoods, I saw properties for sale or about to be foreclosed. The median price of a house had fallen by more than a hundred thousand dollars in the past year, while the rate of unemployment had reached almost 10 percent because jobs in construction, the leading source of income for men, had dried up. The prospects for the future weren't bright, either, since the number of residents who hadn't graduated from high school was almost double the average for Maryland.

In West Denton, I stopped at Joppa Wharf, peeked into the restored passenger terminal, and ate a sandwich while I leaned against the car and then consulted my atlas and noticed roads that tracked the Choptank along the Eastern Shore until it flowed into the bay at Cambridge. Here was an opportunity no vacilador could pass up, particularly one who loves rivers, so I put off the plan to go west on U.S. 50 and took Highway 317 to Oxford instead.

Located at the mouth of the Tred Avon River, another Choptank tributary, Oxford was one of Maryland's only two legal ports of entry during the colonial era—Annapolis was the other—and grew rich by shipping tobacco to England, but the Revolution quashed any further trade with the British. Though the farmers switched to wheat, Oxford languished until the railroad came in 1871 and sparked an oyster boom. The oysters could be packed or canned for transport now, but the beds were so heavily pillaged the boom petered out by the 1920s.

The fields of soybeans and stubbly corn around Oxford were a rich gold color, and the town was a delight, with almost every street delivering a view of the Tred Avon or the Choptank. Fewer than a thousand people live here year-round, and often still earn their keep by working the rivers and the bay.

A little ferry started crossing the Tred Avon to Bellevue in 1683. From April to November, it continues to operate. I made the trip myself that afternoon. It lasted about eight minutes each way, not even long enough to read the extracts section in my copy of
Moby-Dick
.

Eason's Produce sits in a field off Oxford Road. The cornucopic array of fruits and vegetables would have won a blue ribbon at any fair. This was the last of summer's bounty, and doubly seductive because of it—yellow wax and Blue Lake beans, tiny beets like rubies, orange zucchini flowers, fat white peaches, and melons, of course.

Bill Eason presided over the stand, assisted by his granddaughter Hannah—“with two
h
's”—a bubbly blonde high school student with a winning smile. Hannah first hired on as a seven-year-old, and made five dollars a day. Try as she might, she couldn't figure a way to spend it all. Proud to be from the Eastern Shore, she assured me there was no intelligent life west of the bay.

“It's an old joke,” she added, not wanting to sound mean. “They say the same about us.” Her grandfather looked on fondly.

Bill Eason acquired his land in 1959, and tore out an orchard to farm it. He used to grow his own sweet corn, but Talbot County has more people and less water these days. He doesn't want to fuss with irrigation and gets his corn over in Caroline, along with his cantaloupes. Once a week he travels to Pennsylvania to buy heirloom tomatoes and lima beans—“the best I've ever seen”—from some Amish farmers.

His asparagus is homegrown, as are his strawberries, but the deer can be brutal on crops, and Bill isn't as tolerant of nuisances as he was years ago, so he shops almost as much as he farms. When I knocked on a cantaloupe to test its ripeness, he gave me a big juicy one free.

“If you don't eat it right away, it won't go mushy on you or nothing,” he guaranteed.

Meanwhile, I'd started fondling the heirloom tomatoes. I knew it was a sin, but I couldn't stop myself.

“Don't let those ugly stripes on 'em steer you wrong,” Bill advised. “They won't affect the flavor.”

The stripes resembled little wounds that had healed. The tomatoes might have burst at some point during the growth cycle, then formed a scar. They were very soft to the touch and smelled of the vine, much more fragrant than the odorless hothouse varieties. The heirlooms were not only red but also green, yellow, and a purplish hue almost as dark as an eggplant.

Some regular customers turned up, an older couple who owned a summer place. The town draws its summer folks from Baltimore and Washington, and they're usually well-to-do. Bill was too polite not to introduce me, but he described my trip in more grandiose terms than I'd have volunteered.

This didn't sit well with Phil, the new arrival. “Produce stands of America, eh?” he asked snidely. “State of the nation through its vegetables, am I right? Better deal with the financial crisis!”

That was the extent of our conversation. Phil's portfolio, I gathered, had recently been hammered. I didn't fare much better with his wife.

“Bill says you live in Ireland,” she stated flatly, as if submitting evidence. “I travel a lot myself.”

“Where do you like to go?”

“I've been to Canada and Alaska lately, but I am
always
glad to get back to the real United States.”

When they left with a watermelon, I hoped they'd drop it. I paid for half a dozen heirlooms and fondled the corn. I was out of control, really, and wished I had a camp stove like John Steinbeck so I could boil up a couple of ears.