Excursus: Maryland, My Maryland—Missing Persons in Garrett County (Part I)

Smith Island Cake
from Wikipedia

It was surely the oddest of coincidences that on the one day of my life I visited my state government representatives in Annapolis, they—or at least a committee of them—were hearing testimony on the merits of making Smith Island Cake the official State Dessert of Maryland. Being a pie man myself, I have never tasted Smith Island Cake, although the pictures do make it look wicked good. Since we have Amish in both eastern and western Maryland, I would have thought shoofly pie or apple dumplings would also have been in the running, but they weren't. The Smith Island folk did themselves proud and carried the day, which is something the Amish would not have undertaken on the grounds that it is prideful.


But therein lies today's preamble: the variety that is Maryland. I'm a particular fan of the geographic variety available to us here in the Old Line State. By way of example: in the east, we have a bald cypress swamp at the Battle Creek Sanctuary in Calvert County. Bald cypress trees are sub-tropical, yet here they are in Maryland. In the west, however, we have a boreal bog with larch trees at Cranesville Swamp in Garrett County. Larch trees are sub-arctic, yet here they are in Maryland, too. So we have sub-tropical in the east and boreal/sub-arctic in the west. How many other states can claim this variety? (Don't tell me; let me cherish some of my illusions.)

In all honesty, I'm partial to western Maryland because the mountains, creeks, and rivers remind me of McKean County, PA, where I lived from 1960-65. Our family moved there from Lancaster County, PA,  because Dad was asked to take over the ministry at Birch Grove Mennonite Church, near Port Allegany.

The countryside was familiar to me, as our family already had been taking two weeks every summer to teach Summer Bible School in Wrights, PA, which is near Port Allegany. I learned to swim in the bone-chillingly cold water of Portage Creek and loved hiking in the mountains around the cabin where we stayed. Plus, there were whitetail deer and wild turkeys, which we didn't have around our home in Lancaster County.

I left McKean County to go away to school, but the very land itself—the mountains, the hollows, the creeks, the rivers—stayed quite literally in my dreams for years and years. I could take you to certain places that I have dreamt about repeatedly.

Maryland with Garrett County highlighted.

Western Maryland—Garrett County in particular—reminds me of all that. It feels like home, especially since where I live now is right on what geographers call a "fall line," which in this case is the boundary between the Atlantic Coastal Plain and the Piedmont. No mountains in sight. The highest point in Montgomery County is about 880 ft.; the highest point in Garrett County is 3,360 ft.

And today (Nov. 14) it snowed in Garrett County, which also feels like home, as Port Allegany was close enough to Lake Erie to get "lake effect" snows, often starting in mid-November, sometimes giving us upwards of 80" per winter. I shoveled a lot, although many times the snow was powdery enough that I could simply and quickly broom six inches off the sidewalk.

Anyway, here are three of my favorites views in western Maryland:

"Blue Hole" on the North Branch of the Potomac River
Garrett County, MD (near Barnum, WV)
Photo by yours truly. Sept 2013

Brown shoes, brown trout, North Branch
Caught, photographed and released by
yours truly about 1/2 mile above Blue Hole

Coal seam along MD Rt. 135
between Westernport (MD) and Luke (MD)
Me again. This is, by the way, Dr. Henry Louis Gates's
stomping ground: his father worked at the paper mill in Luke.

Truth be told, the coal seam pictured above is still within Allegany County, about 1/2 mile shy of the Garrett County line. But it always makes me happy to see it because it tells me that I'm almost there.

Garrett County was named for John W. Garrett, who served as president of the Baltimore & Ohio ("B&O") Railroad from 1858 until he died in 1884. It is a commonplace that the coming of the B&O to the southern end of Garrett County opened up that part of the county for development, but there is a deeper story involving the railroad that takes us back to a main theme of this blog: the search for missing persons.

Update: I'd completely forgotten that I had taken some pictures of Garrett County's boreal bog, Cranesville Swamp. Here is the best of the lot, which isn't saying much. It's the boardwalk that takes you out over the swamp itself. It's a bit of a hike to get there, but not a difficult one. The whole area is not developed at all. There is no "Visitor Center" with amenities; only a sign with a map showing the trails.

Boardwalk at Cranesville Swamp
July, 2014