The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay

By George R. Merrill

George R. Merrill shares the sacred and profane as they revealed themselves in his forty years of sailing on and living around the Chesapeake Bay. You will meet some of the unique people of tidewater Maryland, be introduced to extraordinary places, explore the gentle terrain of the Eastern Shore and discover how flowers can sing of both joy and sadness. You will join him on his last sail on Periplus, his thirty-eight foot cutter, and a voyage that marks for many sailors, the end of one era and the beginning of another.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481756303

George R. Merrill

George R. Merrill, a native New Yorker, is an Episcopal priest and psychotherapist. An award-winning essayist, he has published work in regional and national magazines and in the journal The Delmarva Review. He is coauthor with Robert J. Wicks of Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart. He serves as nonfiction editor of The Delmarva Review and as a biweekly essayist on Delmarva Public Radio. He and his wife, Jo, live in St. Michaels, Maryland.

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CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgments

The Bay Of The Mother Of God

People And Places

The Right Time

A Show Of Hands

Keep On Truckin’

Meditation On A Septic Tank

Doors On The Shore

The Terrain

Around The Bend

Gunkholes And Sacred Spaces

’Twixt The Marsh And The Skies

Going With The Flow

Ostreida And Homo Sapiens

Owls And Ospreys

Rain Whispers

Critters

For The Birds

Goose Tales

Www. Webs

The Earth Shall Teach Thee

Time Flies

Cardinal Virtue

Flora

Sunflowers

Requiem For A Sunflower

Sailing Into The Sunset

Periplus

DEDICATION

To Jo, with whom I shared the wonders of the Chesapeake Bay and who patiently rescued me from the snares of cyberspace.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Wilson W. Wyatt Jr., editor of The Delmarva Review, for his continuing support of my writing, and to Jeanne Pinault, who takes commas very seriously. I owe an abiding debt to Annie Dillard and Lewis Thomas, whose writings first introduced me to the pure pleasure of reading and writing the essay.

I want to thank two other writers who offered encouraging comments about some earlier essays of mine: author and actor Ben Stein, who wrote that I was a born poet, and Marian Fontana (Widows Walk: A Memoir of 9/11), who generously raised comparisons to Whitman and Thoreau. Their words have buoyed me up immeasurably, and I hope the current work does not let them—or any other readers—down

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Fairlee Creek

THE BAY OF THE

MOTHER OF GOD

I arrived in Baltimore in 1973 via New York City and Connecticut, where I’d lived most of my life. In 1974, when I sailed from Middle River on the Western Shore of the Bay to Fairlee Creek, my first port of call on the Eastern Shore, I discovered the Chesapeake Bay.

In 1570, a lone Spanish vessel sailed into the Chesapeake Bay. The Spanish, perhaps the first Europeans to have seen it, named the Bay Bahia de Madre de Dios, or the Bay of the Mother of God.

That name, Bay of the Mother of God, suggests to me that what they saw and experienced on their arrival held spiritual significance for them. Brother Carrera, a religious sailing with the Spanish expedition wrote of the Bay that it was a great and beautiful port… in it there are many deep water ports, each better than the next. As the Blessed Mother Mary of Catholicism had been to the Spanish faithful, the Bay, too, may have also felt welcoming and hospitable while offering refuge and safety to the travelers.

The following are essays accompanied by my photographs. They describe some of the discoveries I made living and sailing around the Chesapeake Bay. The stories are true, many are playful, and all are reflective. My discoveries in themselves were unremarkable. However, I felt as I lived them out that they had a spiritual character to them, the kind that assumes that the total of an experience equals more than the sum of its parts.

My discoveries around the Bay were each better than the next.

PEOPLE

AND

PLACES

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Otis Turner

THE RIGHT TIME

Worship at nine, the sign read. My wife, Jo, and I arrived five minutes early. People stood around talking outside. At nine someone came with a key, opened the church, and let us file in. We were there that day to accompany my young mentee, Josh, because his grandmother couldn’t be there with him. She worked weekends at a local motel. The church was St. Luke United Methodist Church, an old African American congregation in the small village of Bellevue, located on the Tred Avon River (a tributary of the Choptank River, which flows into the Chesapeake Bay). We belong to the small Episcopal Cathedral in nearby Easton. Our church has no black parishioners.

Well after nine, everyone was in the church still talking, milling about, hugging and shaking hands. It didn’t seem worship would begin any time soon.

Josh is ten years old, an African American. We’re a good match. We like each other. We meet to play dominoes, ride bikes, carve pumpkins at Halloween, play catch, and take dinghy rides on the River, He has a smile that would melt stone, his teacher told me once. She’s right.

Josh lives with his grandmother and grandfather. His grandmother, Lillie Mae, gets on his case when he doesn’t do his schoolwork and she clearly loves him to death She works hard at the motel to make ends meet. Both of Josh’s grandparents have health problems. His grandfather, Robert watches television and smokes cigarettes most of the day. He can’t quit. It worries Lillie Mae; when she comes home from shopping she tells him she forgot the cigarettes he’d asked her to get or that they were out of them. Robert drives Josh to school events and takes Lillie Mae back and forth to work. He’s a steady man.

They live in a house built by Habitat for Humanity that brought them from their house in Cordova to Bellevue. The old house was in disrepair and out in the country. It was difficult for them to move. The family had a long history in Cordova. Lillie Mae and Josh were active in the church nearby, but the move precluded them continuing. Jo and I offered to get Josh started in church until Lillie Mae’s schedule would allow her to begin attending. She welcomed the idea.

We settled in a pew just behind Otis Turner, a lifelong church member whom I’d met three years prior. He told me that he never once missed church. Otis quit working the Chesapeake Bay, where he’d spent his life oystering, crabbing, and skippering packets carrying produce from the Shore to Baltimore. He was then over ninety. Now he goes down to the workboats along the river to talk to waterman. He holds forth like a revivalist preacher, reverently invoking the Lord’s name, while reviewing with anyone who will listen the history of his own salvation. His nephew told me, He’ll talk your ears till they fall off. Otis wearies neither of well doing nor of talking.

I spent a morning sitting with him near the water, by an old workboat called the Amen.

Had no drop of liquor since I was sixteen. Got bad drunk once, but I asked the Lord to take the taste away. He did. Ain’t had no drink since. He told me that he had buried three wives and had lived alone for many years. No woman has ever crossed my doorstep since my wives passed, he’d say and shake his head pensively. Some people have lectured me on their morality, and I’ll feel as if I’m being bludgeoned. Otis’s moral reveries seemed different, as if he