The complete opposite of Smith Island: modern-day Orient Express, from Calais to Istanbul via Budapest instead of Belgrade. Five-day trip in a regular cabin starts from $25K, and it is that much per day if you choose the double-bed suite. The YouTube videos are quite something.

Our introduction to Smith Island, Maryland was the eponymous cake. The story that came with it — accessible only by boat, sparsely populated, bird sanctuary — put it on the (long) list of places we’ll see and things we’ll do once we stop dealing with diapers, where it languished until the news of the island’s impending demise reminded us that the collective we have been out of diapers for years now, and it was the summer break, and we didn’t have anything planned for the coming weekend, and unlike 10 years ago there were now AirBnB listings, and before the day was done we had a one-night stay booked in Tylerton, ⊕ One thing I realized — and I really didn’t need to go to the island for that, looking at a map would have been enough — was that a more appropriate name would have been Smith Islands. You not only need a boat to get there from the mainland, but also to jump from village to village, since the island is criss-crossed with canals. the smaller and more isolated of the three island communities.

And… yes, the demise is near, but not (only) because of climate change. There has been an exodus of people my age and younger from the island, which now has a population one tenth of what it was in the 1990s, comprised for the most part of people 60 and above.

⊕ The house seems abandoned, though the political slogan on the left would suggest otherwise. Note that it would be submerged if it weren't on brick stilts.

Most of what is left is beautiful — political slogans for the 2020 elections of the kind you would expect on the Eastern Shore notwithstanding — but the crumbling, abandoned houses whose backyards have turned into swamps are impossible to miss. In a place so overwhelmed by nature humans have to work extra hard just to keep things as they were, and while Smith Islanders have been working hard, there is just fewer and fewer of them around.

Which is a shame, because the island has been continuously populated since the 17th century and if anything humanity has more technology and more resources now to continue this unique culture. Hasn’t the Netherlands successfully fought the Atlantic ocean, never mind the quiet waters of the Chesapeake? But the Dutch have nowhere else to go, whereas there is plenty of space left in North America. Smith Island wouldn’t be the first one in Maryland to be abandoned.

But while it’s there, do go and see it. Bring bug spray. Bring cash. Bring more of both than you would have thought reasonable for a short stay. Don’t plan on walking outside much, unless that bug spray you bring is really good. If you own a boat, bring that too and don’t be reliant on the once-per-day ferry. If you don’t own a boat make sure to call captain Eddie Corbin to help you around and show you the nesting brown pelicans. ⊕ And get a story ready for your kids when they see a seagull kill and eat a few of the young from the nest in front of their eyes. Like, isn’t nature grand? or some such. With or without a boat, get a Smith Island cake from Ms. Mary Ada Marshall, either directly or from the only store in town, which will also have the best soft shell crab sandwich you’ve ever had, and the best crab cake outside of Baltimore’s Faidley’s.

But seriously, have that bug spray with you.

Tylerton, Smith Island, Maryland. Yes, that Smith Island.

Chris Arnade wrote a delightful little story from Japan after a few not so great experiences, and it’s great, you should read it, but what really got me nodding was when at the end he meets a young couple at the airport and they start telling him about the cool places they’ll see in Tokyo, and

I wanted to tell them though, slow down, stop trying to maximize your experience by checking off a list and maximize your experience by letting stuff happen naturally, and connecting with people.

It may be a matter of age because a few decades ago I was that young couple, solo edition, but, as the solo became a 2+3, slowed down by necessity, and lo and behold the best experiences on trips were not the ones we planned but the ones we got while looking for a restroom in Richmond for a just-out-of-diapers toddler, let’s say.

So yes, it’s a cliche. Slow down. Take it all in. Don’t overthink and overplan. ⊕ But do think and plan. Everything in moderation: another good cliche. But you know what? It’s true! Even more so when the young’uns are under pressure to deliver that perfect shareable shot.

A day that began in Hillwood gardens in DC ended at the National Aquarium in Baltimore. These two were happy to pose.

Walking through Hillwood yesterday was too much so I had to tone it down.

Speaking of crumbling architecture, Abandoned America has some breathtaking photos from abandoned US hospitals, most of them unnamed and with undisclosed locations to prevent vandalism. But the only one I ever visited, the Athens Lunatic Asylum, was easy to recognize.

After a weekend at the beach, it is only fitting that I link to this beautifully illustrated WaPo article on beachcoming. You will never guess what the top item collected at beach cleanups was in 2021.

Just kidding, of course you will — it’s cigarette butts.

Visiting Montauk beach at Calvert Cliffs, a family member had one mission: to find a shark tooth. Millions of years ago, this part of Chesapeake was warmer and mostly under water. Many a shark dropped a tooth or a hundred during that time; today, they tend to drift to the shore with some regularity.

Searching for a speck of black in a tapestry of white-gray brought to mind Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, more specifically the chapter about learning to see, and yet even more specifically, her discovering praying mantis egg cases This is a longer blog post from The Examined Life about writers and insects; scroll down for the Pilgrim… excerpt. everywhere she looked, once she learned what one looks like.

My own learning-to-see training started with watching birds — not organized or consistent enough to be called birdwatching — and realizing in short order that not every brown-gray bird smaller than a robin is a sparrow, that blue jays, cardinals, and woodpeckers are actually quite abundant even in urban areas, and that those blue jays, as magnificent as they are, usually sound like nails on a chalkboard. The beach makes for even better training grounds. For novices like us there are mermaid’s purses and loggerhead turtle tracks — we saw both during our Outer Banks excursion — things alien enough to immediately be recognized as something. The mental exercise consists of discovering what that something is.

Not so with shark teeth, especially not with the small ones you are more likely to come across during a daytime summer stroll, as opposed to a planned break-of-dawn winter expedition. Is it a spiky piece of iron ore? A fossilized crab claw? Tooth of a mammal? Who knows!? Short of finding a 6-inch dental behemoth, casual beachgoers like us will come up with a million reasons why this black triangle isn’t an actual tooth, and why this other may be, without ever knowing if they are correct. Annie Dillard could put that insect egg casing in a jar and see dozens of tiny praying mantisses scuttle out and devour each other. I can put my black triangle in a dish and look at it until the Sun implodes, and it will continue being that same black triangle, possibly melted.

Unless, of course, we find an expert to tell us why these ridges here mean that it comes from a shark’s jaw, or why this dent over there means it is actually part of a crab. And, knowing that, we will know with certainty — conditional on us trusting the expert — what those two particular artifacts are, but could hardly extrapolate to other pieces of black material found on the beach, and most certainly not to those nestled on the forest floor, or buried in the desert sands, or hiding under the carpet of a 3-story walk-up.

This is in fact very much how medicine works: sometimes, the symptoms are clear enough and occur often enough that you may know as well as an MD that there is a urinary tract infection brewing. But too often — most of the time, in fact — the problems are subtle and chronic and may not develop into something recognizable until it is too late — in which case you better find an expert — or, maybe, never amount to much of anything — in which case you need that expert even more, the most valuable part of medical expertise consisting of the knowledge and experience needed to muster the confidence to say that something is just a piece of rock.

Update: Two months later, we went back and found some.

We came to Calvert Cliffs for the fossils, and the cliffs delivered!