Letters

Nor can I blame him, Dad. These placid Maryland waters, these mild English-looking swards and copses, are too close to Our Nation’s Capital not to have been the secret mise en scène of fearsome hugger-mugger since well before C.I.A. and O.S.S. — back at least to 1812. The very charts I navigate by reflect it: Restricted Area, Prohibited Area, NASA Maintained, Navy Maintained. Our gentle Chesapeake is a fortress camouflaged, from Edgewood Arsenal and Aberdeen Proving Grounds at its head to Norfolk Navy Yard at its mouth, with Andrews and Dover air force bases on either side and God knows what, besides Camp David, in the hills behind. Nerve gas, napalm, nukes; B-52’s above, atomic submarines below, destroyers, missile frigates, minesweepers, jet fighters, and every other sort of horrific hardware all about — and these but the visible and declared! While in the basements of certain handsome Georgetown houses, or on horsey-looking farms along the Rappaha

But oh my: those of us who happen to have reached our story’s last chapter anyhow, or its next-to-last — did we ever want to get back to our office now and play Deep-Sea Angler, as we could not from any literal Osborn Jones! I sailed the sixteen miles from St. Mike’s (’bye) out of Eastern Bay and down to Poplar Island, a good spot from which either to end or to continue the cruise. Here in 1813 the British invasion fleet gathered in the fine natural harbor (deeper then) for provisioning raids and repairs; Franklin Roosevelt used to cruise over in the Potomac for weekends with his cronies in an old Democratic club on one of the three islands. All are uninhabited now except by snakes, turtles, seabirds, and a crew of biologists (one hopes and supposes; there is a NASA beacon off to westwards…) from the Smithsonian, which now owns the place and maintains a “research facility” in the former clubhouse. For all one knew they might be counterespionagists, interrogating spies whisked in from Embassy Row or the other side of the globe…

But bye-bye, paranoia. They truly could be something sinister, those young neat-bearded chaps who waved from their dock as I anchored in the clean sand bottom of Poplar Harbor; Jane’s fiancé, likewise, truly could be something other than what he represented himself to be — and very probably they and he were not. They were biologists. He was a Canadian gentleman of leisure. Buffalo’s “C.I.A./F.B.I. types” were part of our government’s paranoia about the antiwar movement and the traffic of disaffected youngsters across the Peace Bridge into Ontario. And Harrison Mack’s freeze-dried feces would turn up in an office safe or the archives of Marshyhope State. Time to shorten scope on my imagination; in the morning I would flip a coin (as I did once on the Cambridge Creek Bridge on June 21 or 22, 1937, very near the end of 13 L) to decide what to do.

A restless night. O.J. pitched a bit in a surprise southerly that fetched across the low-lying island and the open harbor; I was on deck every few hours to check for drag by taking bearings on the “clubhouse” lights, which for some reason burned all night. In the morning, a fresh pretty one, the air was back where it belonged, NNW 5–7. My head was muzzy; Todds Point was but a quick eleven-mile run through Knapps Narrows and across the mouth of the Choptank; I could eat lunch in my cottage, put the cruise away, and hit the office fresh after the weekend. Heads I keep going — to certain haunts on Patuxent and Potomac, to Smith and Tangier islands, then home to my dearest and closest, the Tred Avon and the Choptank — tails I pack it in. I flipped my nickel and got, not “the ski

Home, then.

But I am, Dad, and will be for some days yet, Todd Andrews, and this is 13 R: no more to be dictated now than then by a “miserable nickel” (worth, three decades later, half as much as its Indian-headed, buffalo-tailed predecessor). I upped anchor, bid good-bye to Poplar Island and Whatever Goes On There, and set my course for 200°: an easy, lazy, self-steering all-day run straight down the Chesapeake, wing and wing under O.J.‘s long-footed main and jib, whisker-poled out. Past the nothing where Sharps Island used to be, on whose vanished beach Jane Mack and I once coupled (Restricted and Prohibited areas to starboard: Naval Research Lab firing range); past vanishing James Island off the Little Choptank, where some 1812 invaders once came to grief and where Polly Lake and I, many Augusts, came to joy; 30-odd gliding miles down through a hot late-summer Saturday, listening to the Texaco opera (Tosca) and rereading the story of my life in The Floating Opera; to where (in this nonfictional rerun) the Coast Pilot turns into a catalogue of horrors—204.36: Shore bombardment, air bombardment, air strafing, and rocket firing area. U.S. Navy. 204.40: Long-range and aerial machine-gun firing, U.S. Naval Propellant Plant. 204.42: Aerial firing range and target areas, U.S. Naval Air Test Center. 204.44: Naval guided missiles operations area… Air Force practice bombing and rocket firing… Underwater demolitions area, U.S. Naval Amphibian Base… Air Force precision test area—and where I turned into the Patuxent, seven peaceful hours later, and anchored for the night behind Solomons Island, intending to say goodbye next day to Mill and St. Leonard creeks.

Instead of which, I said hello to Jane Mack and Baron André Castine. It being the weekend, a great many yachts were in the anchorage already, large and small, power and sail — so many that I had my hands full finding a spot with room to swing, ru

That is, a lean ta

Small world, I megaphoned back from O.J.‘s bows. Let me wash and change.

I ca