Western Wind, Eastern Shore

A FOREWORD

       That novel-in-progress afore referred to was LETTERS, an enormous and intricate project that occupied most of my forties. Seven novels in one, really, it took about seven years to complete. The axis of its action corresponds to the axis of the War of 1812 (with which, among other things, it deals: my personal favorite among American wars) and, as it happens, the axis of my life: a line from tidewater Maryland through Pennsylvania to the Great Lakes and the Niagara Frontier.

       The autobiographical element in my fiction is slight; more often the relation works the other way around, the fiction turning out to be banal prophecy, perhaps even a contributing cause of what its author later winds up doing. I came back to Maryland partly because my lapsed hero Bellerophon (in Chimera) had already fallen from Olympus into the Dorchester County marshes, and because while in Boston I had begun the novel LETTERS, much of which is set in the neighborhood of Chesapeake Bay.

       I had taught myself how to sail on Lake Chautauqua, the thumb of New York's Finger Lakes; now we bought a small cruising sailboat, and in the spring of 1974 began exploring the literal as well as the figurative geography of the Chesapeake -- an enterprise still far from finished. In connection with that enterprise I met an expert sailor-photographer, Robert de Gast, who invited me to circumnavigate the Delmarva Peninsula with him -- a month's voyage -- and write a text to accompany the book of photographs he had in mind. The LETTERS project would not permit so long a holiday, but I made the voyage with him in my imagination while Shelly and I, aboard our Cobweb II, improved our skills with modest weekend cruises on the Choptank River. And I was pleased to write this foreword to de Cast's book -- the subtitle of which is A Sailing Cruise Around the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia -- when The Johns Hopkins Press published it in 1975.

       Robert de Gast is a Dutch-born photographer, writer, and sailor who free-lances out of Baltimore and sails out of Annapolis, the Marblehead of Chesapeake Bay. In May 1974, he did a simple, delightful thing which no one seems to have thought of doing before, at least for the record: Mostly alone, mostly under sail, he circumnavigated the Delmarva Peninsula, that shrimp-shaped entity (comprised of Virginia's Accomack and Northampton counties, Maryland's Eastern Shore, and nearly the entire state of Delaware) which swims north toward Pennsylvania with its feet in the Chesapeake and the Atlantic on its back. Up from the Bay Bridge, through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, down Delaware Bay he sailed, poking into rivers, creeks and by-ways on his way; then inside the skinny barrier islands along Delmarva's Atlantic shore (a route almost virgin to the cruising sailor), around Cape Charles, and up Pocomoke and Tangier sounds to his starting place, duly nosing into the Pocomoke River, the Little and Great Choptanks, the Tred Avon, the Wye, the Miles -- most of the major estuaries and a few of the major creeks, big as rivers themselves, of the inexhaustible Eastern Shore.

       Bertrand Russell observed, about coastlines generally, that their length can be measured only by ignoring enough actuality: coves, points, rocks, grains of sand. De Gast found this wistfully true of his twenty-four-day circuit of Delmarva: The whole period would not have done justice to the Choptank alone, not to mention the Wye, the Chester, the Sassafras. But he rediscovered the improbable Smyrna and the cypressed, tuckahoed, magical Pocomoke. . .

       Any competent, imaginative sailor with a shoal-draft boat and three weeks on his hands might do as much -- must surely long to, once he reads this book. What Robert de Gast brought to the voyage (in addition to his delicate eye and lens, which need another paragraph) was the knowledgeability that makes his earlier photo-essays, The Oystermen of the Chesapeake and The Lighthouses of the Chesapeake, as delightful to those who know his subject intimately as to those who don't. Having mastered English second, he hears its tidewater dialect perhaps more accurately than we who grew up with it in our ears. He has done the requisite regional-historical Homework; wears it lightly; invokes it aptly and unsentimentally. This voyager, like this voyage, is quiet, able, self-effacing.

       He is seldom to be seen, for example, in the photographs which illuminate his text; neither is his shapely Olin Stephens sloop, Slick Ca'm. Nor are any human beings at all. These were among the first of a series of tactful artistic decisions -- and surely the hardest for a sailor who loves his boat and a photographer who relishes people -- following upon what I take to have been his working premise: that having essayed the oystermen and the lighthouses of the Eastern Shore, he would bring Home this time, from this voyage, the place itself.

       Properly therefore he works in black and white; that is, in infinite shades of gray. To the eye, the Eastern Shore is strictly, beautifully monotonous, especially those endless lowlands which, as a Netherlander himself, de Gast responds to with particular sensitivity. To Dutchmen, Eastern Shoremen, and shoal-draft sailors, the boundary between land and sea is never prominent and always negotiable; their world, as Gertrude Stein remarked of the Spanish landscape, has few things in it, and so each thing exists with peculiar substantiveness. It is a world of such ubiquitous horizontality -- sand bars, mud flats, the 360° horizon itself -- that any verticals in it are more or less startling, interesting, even important, ipso facto: a mast; a piling; a heron's legs; loblolly pine trunks; the separate reeds of spartina grass. Even the surface of the water (everywhere, everywhere!) is prevailingly "slick calm," at least in the pictures: Days One, Six, and Nineteen, when the seas got too vertical for photography, properly belong to the open-water passages of the voyage and text, not to the essence of either.

      Mirrored in that calm, and in the tranquil lens and log of Robert de Gast, every low landfall is a Rorschach image: imposing nothing, evoking whatever the viewer, or voyager, brings to it. The skipper of Slick Ca'm brought more than most tidewater travelers, and more than any photographer so far, to his charming one-way round trip: neither a sea saga nor a soul-search nor a cruising guide nor a travelogue nor a Coffee-table picture book, but a calm circumspection of the Eastern Shore.

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