I have recently updated my life with a new computer which, though it is far from the top of the line and though I have not yet purchased half of the wingdings and thingajiggies that will make it perfectly up to date, makes my old computer look like a hand-shaped stone tool. Hopefully this means that I will a)be more productive in developing lesson plans and tests for my li’l darlings, b)will blog more often and c)will be able to more readily access naughty pictures.
This is one of my rare concessions to modern convenience. Most often, I find the time-saving developments and life-enhancers of the last fifty or so years to be either extraneous or annoying. It doesn’t take much more time to hang clothes out than it does to load a dryer, and my clothes have such a nice fresh smell. I’m anal about things like table linens, so I’d iron them even if I did have a dryer. I’m not anal about other things, like khakis, so I don’t iron them even though I probably should, since I don’t have a dryer. Air-conditioning–well, you all know my feelings on that. It’s fine for movie houses but for people houses, it’s expensive and I’m convinced that it poisons people with nasty uncirculated air. Besides, being hot is a very good excuse to sit down with a gin-and-tonic and a trashy novel.
I will accede to a few other innovations besides computers (and cell phones, which I still find marvelously novel and amusing). I deplore our car-centric culture for what it’s done to beautiful forms of transit, like Baltimore’s famous streetcars or the C&O Railroad’s George Washington Limited. On the other hand, it sure makes it easier for me to get to the beach.
Despite its status as one of the country’s most important ports, Baltimore is a damned long way from the ocean. The Chesapeake Bay isn’t at our front door–it is our front door. The Atlantic is a different animal and it lives a long way off. Even in my childhood, in order to get to the ocean, you had to leave the city via Ritchie Highway, spend nearly an hour getting through all the suburban traffic lights to Annapolis (nearly two hours on summer Saturday mornings, as you joined the ocean-bound horde), sit for another hour in the traffic backed up to cross the Bay Bridge, and then wend your way down the Eastern Shore–not so bad for those Rehoboth-bound folk, but the Ocean City devotees got stuck again in traffic at the narrow bridge at Cambridge and once again getting through downtown Salisbury. In the high season, it took nearly five hours to get to OC.
At that, we were lucky. In my father’s day, the roads were the same, but you had to fart around waiting for the ferries that preceded the Bay Bridge. Each one held about twenty cars and the Bay crossing took forty-five minutes. Then, it took about seven hours to get from the city to the Atlantic.
In my grandfather’s era, things were even tougher. (Now, to be fair, that generation had the option of taking a Wilson Line or Old Bay Line steamer to one of several bay beaches, too.) If you wanted to get to the ocean, you had to: Find your way down to the Light street wharves, catch a steamer for the Eastern Shore, catch the Pennsylvania Railroad, and sit back in the excruciating heat as the train piddled its way through every jerkwater town (there are a lot of them) to one of the beach resorts. In 1915, it took Granddad about twelve hours to get from Mount Royal avenue to the Hotel Atlantic.
This Sunday, I went down to Rehoboth and came back all in one day. I-97 has made Annapolis a twenty-five minute trip; new bridges over the Kent Narrows and the Choptank have decimated problems on the Shore. I am now happily tanned, have eaten Grotto Pizza and have been knocked ass over teakettle by a couple of waves that I didn’t see until it was too late.
There was one rite of summer that I didn’t observe, though, and I regret it. Although I only spent about eight hours on Delaware’s silver strand, I should have found the time to send postcards to everyone back home.