JUN-A-8
MY EASTERN SHORE WEEKEND
AND PLAN FOR A
“DEER CONTROL HUNT”
WITH AN UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTER WITH
THE BLACKWATER
EAGLEMAN TRIATHALON
June 8-10,
2002
I left GWU early on Friday to takeoff on a hot day after a stormy prior day in which I was caught in the rain after a very threatening afternoon which turned windy and dark before the big blow. I had run almost the whole way back from Aspen Hill on the eighth mile of my return run at Needwood. I only learned from a call that Craig Schaefer made, that I was not the only victim of this storm. I got drenched to the bone as I was planning my trip out to Cambridge MD on Craig’s weekend off, as we planned to go out for the first time to shoot deer on the deer control permit for the farm protection on Chester and Carol Jones’s farm at Newark. We never did get in very much good time there to see anything---except a single fox---and we never did see deer when we were prepared to shoot them, whereas they stood around us in the tender new shoots at every other point as we drove around the Eastern Shore on the weekend. I was in the Thursday night wind and rainstorm, and I was not alone. The severe weather warning went across the Chesapeake Bay to The Wye Oak.
When
we had gone out to Easton Maryland, the kids and I had picnicked and visited
under the Wye Oak, the largest white oak in the US if not the world, and the
state tree of Maryland. It is a
landmark in Maryland and had been for over a century of its 460 years. The windstorm crossed the Bay and felled the
Wye Oak. I went to say goodbye, paying
my respects to this venerable monarch, and even carried home a few twigs and
leaves. There were people there such as
one sobbing woman who said she had been married under the Wye Oak on July 6,
1943. I remembered multiple visits with
Donald and Michael. But, no more. The tree was literally picked up and tossed
over the road, which was closed with a yellow police line tape and all the
Maryland DNR and forestry vehicles and personnel were there chopping up pieces
of it. I took pictures, and took back
with me the small cuttings they are permitting tourists to have, but for the
major lumber is up for public ideas on www.wyeoakideas.st.md
I
made it to Cambridge, MD where Craig is busier than he ever imagined himself to
be shortly ago, having done over 25 cases this week. It is good that things
have worked out so well for him. After
arrival, Craig was still finishing his last case, a carotid endarterectomy, and
after he was finished, it was too late for us to go out to do the twilight
session in looking for deer. Instead,
we called Ashley and David and went to Salisbury where we took them out to
dinner at the Hunan Restaurant where I had been with them before. The kids are doing well and are maturing
after some resistance earlier and a few missed steps. David is thinking of applying to the Towson University where his
sister Ashley is entering her junior year.
Each is working at jobs found n the Salisbury area in the summer
interval.
The
next morning, I took a run along the Choptank River while Craig waited for
fifteen file cases of his Salisbury medical practice to be transferred over
and stored in the spacious attic of the new office he shares with Bill Bair. I found a lot of preparations being made for
a large event along the Choptank labeled Eagle Man. I learned that it was all set up for the “Blackwater Eagle man Triathlon”
and 1700 participants in the large triathlon event for the following day.
There would be a “seventy mile event” Of this 2 km (1.2 miles) would
be a swim in the Choptank River along a course marked by a string of buoys
and which would have a series of “waves” entering it, of different age and
sex groups marked by different color swim caps (e.g. “powder blue” would be
the females aged 30—35). Then there would be a 56.5-mile bike ride (on
a variety of sophisticated high tech bikes which ranged from expensive to
atrocious in the $8,000 range—not your wicker basket with a kick stand type
of event!) The finale was a 13.1-mile
(a half marathon) run. Last year on
the sixteenth running there were 500 women who broke five hours! There were some international “Tri” athletes
participating who would do the whole event in something like 3:40! I would be a witness of this event from start
to finish—a very photogenic kind of athletic experience, with a central bike
ride through the flat fast and scenic marsh roads of Blackwater Wildlife Refuge.
If I could do any more than stay alive in the water and make any kind
of time in the “combat swim” component, I would like to do a “TRI”.
But even the swim requires a good wet suit and special equipment, let
alone the biking component, which had titanium alloy ergonomically designed
bikes, which were carried in special bike buses to protect them. There were large numbers of support groups
in teams traveling with the triathletes.
The high points of my stay
in the Eastern Shore were not the deer hunt, then, but the Wye Oak farewell,
and the Eagle Man introduction—each unexpected.