From the road, I texted my friend Nick to tell him where I was heading, and I figured that, as a Maryland lifer, it would probably register with him. It didn't. "Where's that?" he texted back. Crisfield, it must be said, is far away from everything. It is remote in a way that I never realized any part of Maryland could be. From the district it is, according to Google Maps, a three hour and fifteen minute trek. It is over an hour and a half away from Easton - and Easton is far. The drive covered miles of nondescript state routes and tended to remind me, oddly, of rural Ohio, where I have also spent what seems like a full days of my life driving on nondescript state routes. Somewhere near the hamlet of Fruitland, the road tapered into a very tight two lanes and I figured that it was about merge into someone's driveway. "Take. Ferry," my GPS said, as if she had been expecting this all along. And so I waited patiently at a stop sign for the ferry - a barge, roughly the length of three cars - floated up to the shore of the body of water before us. Once on the ferry, the driver (captain?) encouraged us to get out and stretch our legs for the duration of the five-minute voyage. "Where ya from?" he asked in a friendly accent that couldn't be described as anything but Southern. DC, to him, might as well have been near Tulsa. He implored us to get a bed and breakfast for the night, rather than brave the long trip back home. "It's too long fer one day!" he admonished us.
Crisfield itself was not the New Englandy, colonial, quaint town I was expecting. There is decidedly practical feel to the main drag. Yes, there are scores of crab houses, but they are next to auto parts stores and Subway and CVS. Crisfield does not look like Rockport, Massachusetts - which is fine. Rockport, Massachusetts is certainly a beautiful town, but I can't walk around it without the distinct impression that no one actually lives there - at least not year round. People live in Crisfield: pot-bellied guys in shades and Orioles jerseys, groups of high school kids wearing the purple and yellow of Crisfield High School (home of the Crabbers), old women with salty, wrinkled faces, who have been coming to the Crab Derby for a long time.
The Derby is less a tourist attraction than it is a special occasion for the locals. And, to the residents of Crisfield, crabs are not a food for special occasions. A BBQ tent behind the bleachers provided most of the food for the event, so the smell of dry rub - not Old Bay - accompanied the scene. So much for my vision of what constitutes an authentic Eastern Shore experience. I skipped the pulled pork in favor of the beer tent - taps of Miller Lite were housed in a truck, parked behind the main bleachers. I was sure I had misheard when after asking the woman manning the tap for two beers, she responded - with a straight face - "That'll be two dollars." Clearly we were not in DC any more - in any sense. As much as the price of beer signified to me that I was in the presence of a different culture, it couldn't compare to the event itself, which was at once quaint, wacky, and oddly riveting.
A boat-docking competition works like this: a motor boat pulls up to the center of the bay, which on this day resembled an arena. (It was flanked by two long sections of bleachers on one side and a hotel with many balconies on the other. On the open side of the bay, a row of boats held as many spectators as both the bleachers and the hotel balconies.) An official (and he was official - dressed in what looked like a park ranger uniform, complete with the hat) fires a gun into the air. The boat runs a few feet and then swerves into a quick uniform. Using the momentum from the turn, it then backs up as quickly as possibly into a "parking spot": four wooden poles. One of the members of the crew (there are three total) ties a rope around each pole and an air horn blows to signify that the boat has been successfully "docked" - or "parked," as the landlubber in me wants to say.
What is the appeal to this competition? By means of comparison, think about heading into town for the big annual parallel parking competition. Yee-haw!
I think that park of the appeal is that certain people find it appealing. Admittedly, this seems like circular logic, but it's true. I don't have much of an appreciation for soccer, yet I still enjoy the World Cup in some sense, because I enjoyed watching other people live and die with what they were seeing. Sports are mostly interesting because of the emotions attached to them, and there was certainly no shortage of emotion at the New York bar where I watched that final Spain vs. Netherlands match. The same was true here: I have no real emotional reaction to three men very quickly lassoing four polls so that their boat will stay put, but - and I mean this with no condescension whatsoever - I love that other people do.
The meal was followed with an entree described on the menu at the Olde Crisfield Restaurant and Crabhouse as an "Enormous Crabcake." It was predictably both enormous and delicious.
I'm happy that Crisfield is one of the 1000 Places to See Before You Die in the US and Canada. With no disrespect to the Rockports and Bar Harbors and Myrtle Beaches of the world (all of which have their own clear and widely documented charm), Crisfield is a real place, with real good crabs, real cheap beer, and a real odd sport to call its own.
[PS - 1000 Places to See Before You Die in the US and Canada presents a bit of a problem in the way it documents Crisfield. Because it lists the town along with Smith and Tangier Island. I am fairly certain that to check it off completely would be cheating - and yet I can't help but feel that my adventure deserves more than one third of a check. I have not been this confused since reading only one third of Dos Passos' USA Trilogy, and trying to decide on an appropriate notation.]
No comments:
Post a Comment