Dispatches from the Eastern Shore

I am sitting in this slightly lavendar 150 year old, 11’ x 15’ wood frame house perched on the banks of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. Built as a cottage for the waterway’s wharf-master, it served various needs of this small community over its colorful lifetime: barbershop, tailor shop, ice house, and now guest lodge.

It is also the closest I have come to sleeping in a haunted house, not because of unexplained phenomena or things that go bump in the night, but because my imagination keeps conjuring up all the pioneering inhabitants who trod these paneled floors before me.

The cottage is in the historic town of Chesapeake City, which itself is located at the northern tip of the Chesapeake Bay. The city (the term is more honorific than precise given the town's diminutive size) was born of economic infatuations and human ingenuity, and played a key supporting (if unsung) role in the development of our nation. It was created when the locks for the canal were installed, exactly half way between the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, serving the workers who managed the engines that drove the waterworks that made this artificial channel run.

As early as the mid-1600s, Dutch envoy and mapmaker Augustine Herman suggested creating a watercourse between Philadelphia and Baltimore to avoid the time, expense and dangers of rounding the Delmarva Peninsula. Instead of 300 miles out to sea and back again, a traverse of a mere 14 inland miles could connect the rivers that connected the Bays, and the markets and resources beyond.

It took 150 more years before the canal was dug, but ultimately, the will, the financing and the engineering came together. The C&D Canal opened in 1829, four years after the inauguration of the 363-mile long Eerie Canal and amid the heyday of the canal boom in America. Until then, the interior of this vast continent was still mostly closed to its most recent inhabitants, but the man-made waterways newly coursing through the land were the wedges that were cracking it open.

At night, when all else is still, we can hear the water lapping on the shore each time a boat passes. From small boats with single outboard motors to enormous shipping vessels that blot out the sky, the water traffic makes this canal the busiest in the United States.

Who knew?

Humans have been geo-engineering this earth for thousands of years, from crafting furrows and aqueducts that water our fields to building mighty dams that power the engines of our lives.

Pushing the earth around, using the resources of this fair planet in ways that enable us to extend the natural boundaries of creation, is part of the human enterprise. We are partners with God, made in God's image, which means that to be human is not just to be creatures who use and protect life, but who enhance it, as well.

But just as God created the world as regenerative and ever-renewing, so must we. It is a mandate we forgot in the passion of the industrial revolution and our addictive gorging on fossil fuel. But thankfully it is a memory that is re-emerging and once again guiding our way.

The C&D canal is a thriving waterway, with fish and plants and commerce commingling. That is the way life should be - ever-developing and ever-renewing. That is the way we must once again build and grow our civilization.