Cruising in the Company of Saints
Everything was serene in the land of the saints. As serene as hell. First, it was about as hot as the Inferno’s eighth ring (in case you lost count, that’s the one where the great sailor Ulysses is eternally slow-roasted for his part in the Trojan War). Second, it was humid enough to bathe in. Third, there was no wind. And fourth, I was beginning to quote poetry. Saints,
preserve us!
It had begun well enough. My husband Rick and I, along with our friend Hal, had decided to celebrate a kind of midsummer All Saints Day by cruising the St. Marys River and visiting its related nominal holinesses—St. Mary’s College, Historic St. Mary’s City, St. George Creek, St. George Island and St. Inigoes Creek—names further sanctified by being crucial to Maryland’s founding story. Maryland’s first settlers landed on St. Clements Island, but learned that the Yaocomaco Indians were holding a kind of going-out-of-business sale along the St. Marys River (not its name then, of course) because the tribe wanted to consolidate its numbers farther upriver as protection from attack by another more fearsome Native American organization. In addition to the land, the Indians also threw in their old houses and all their cultivated fields, so the newcomers pulled out their chests of pretty beads and closed the deal. Then they named everything in sight for various saints and settled down to make a new colony.
On the morning before the official cruise was to begin, Rick and I sailed across the Potomac from the Yeocomico (same Indians, different side of the river) and then idled away the long, still afternoon with iced drinks and good books under the ancient oaks at St. Mary’s Yachting Center on Carthagena Creek.