First off, sorry about that week I skipped there. It wasn’t intentional, it is just that the family and I went off to grandma’s house and it is very easy to sit there reading Hemingway and imagining myself as a writer and that kept me from actually writing. I did get a lot of reading done, however. In the week long vacation to grandma’s house I managed to get through The Sun Also Rises, The Book of Luelen, a book on K-Boats (creatively titled K Boats), The Warriors, and a book called Land Below the Wind which was a memoirs of Agnes Smith. Agnes Smith married a member of the British civil service and moved to Borneo in 1934. I am a sucker for most any book published between 1930-1960, especially ones about Oceania, and more especially written by adventurers, and most especially of all those written by women adventurers, so when I spotted this book in the Annapolis Bookstore there was no way I couldn’t not buy it, which I tried to do. I highly recommend it.

My major project as of late has been trying to get a license as a 3rd Mate and a 3rd Engineer. Of the many career options I have available one of the more attractive is working on merchant ships. This option is attractive because it pays fairly well, lets me grow a beard and stare steely-eyed into the sea, and allows me to apply many of the skills I acquired over my illustrious naval career. I do get a whole lot of credit for the things I have done in the Navy but to qualify to sit for either of the exams for 3rd Mate or 3rd Eng I have a few more classes I need to take. In an effort to get these completed as quickly as possible, I’ve concocted a fairly quick schedule that takes me to nearly every maritime training institution in the mid-Atlantic region. A started a few weeks ago at the Chesapeake Maritime Training Institute, and then the next week at the Mid-Atlantic Maritime Academy.

These classes have been an, um, experience. Prior to these classes I have had exactly zero experience with the wide world of civilian maritime. With that being said, the biggest thing I’m getting out of these classes isn’t so much the subject material itself but a feel for the background of it and what is the “norm” on civilian ships. In a lot of ways it is very similar to what I saw as a submarine officer (having looked into civilian requirements and experienced military requirements, it is very obvious the military requirements for being in charge of a sea-going vessel are written with the civilian requirements very much in mind), but I need to learn how the civilians do it. For example, I am learning what the hell it is that people like Chief Mates and Chief Stewards do. I also learned that there exists a thing called a “Navy Nozzle” that I had never heard of, despite being in the Navy. There are lies being spread somewhere and I don’t know if the fault is with the civilians or with the Navy.

The most entertaining day so far, however, was our on-the-water day in my lifeboatman course. This course was all about lifeboats: when to get into one, how to get into one, and what to do once your find yourself in one. As part of this course, we rowed around an open lifeboat. This is the kind that the Titanic had,so you’re familiar with it. Leading the class and teaching us how to row a lifeboat was our instructor, who in sunglasses had an uncanny resemblance to a low-rent Sylvester Stallone. The rowers were a rag-tag bunch of people from all levels of our exotic maritime industry. A big part of the day was learning all the various rowing commands. These strike me as a bit of a lost art, seeing that we invented motors, but it is comforting to know that if I were to wind up in 18th-century England I could land a job as a coxswain. It was less comforting to learn that rowing an open lifeboat was terrible, and I just kept trying to imagine how much it would suck to be stuck in one in anything resembling weather, especially with 30 other people who I liked a lot more before I was stuck in a lifeboat with them. I think I got a brief glimpse into how it is that people contemplate cannibalism. With a lot of “TOSS OARS” and “OUT OARS” and “GIVE WAY TOGETHER” and other such things we managed to make our little lifeboat go around the harbor. We also made several more or less graceful pier landings and only crashed once or twice. The power of teamwork! The major compliment I received that day was “you’re a deck guy, right?” and the major lesson I learned was “don’t let your ship sink.” These were important things to take to heart.

Don’t worry, fine readers, the adventures of Pat and Ian Go To Various Maryland Historic Sites continues. Today we went to Fort Washington. Fort Washington is located on the Potomac River a little south of DC. It was built in 1809 and designed to protect DC from anybody who might want to invade, or whatever. Like that would ever happen. I had never heard of the place until I was looking for National Parks to go visit with all of my unemployment time.

Ian and I set off on a bright Wednesday morning and arrived a little before lunchtime. We very nearly had the place to ourselves; I only spotted one couple walking around and a dude playing some one-on-zero basketball the whole time we were there. Our first stop was the visitor’s center, where the Park Ranger just seemed excited to have someone to talk to. When I first looked up this park, I was expecting something very similar to Fort McHenry. Both of the forts were built at about the same time and have similar(ish) histories. The big difference, though, is that people care about Fort McHenry due to that whole star-spangled banner thing, and I had never heard of Fort Washington before. Consequently, Fort Washington does not seem as well funded.

The visitor’s center has a small but well-done display of the fort’s history and some artifacts from the site. Like I said, the fort was built in 1809 but in a harbinger of things to come was under-funded, under-gunned, and under-manned. When, in the War of 1812, the British did sail up the Potomac, the commander decided his best course of action was to blow up the fort and skedaddle. After the war, the place was rebuilt, and, not wanting to be embarrassed again, the Army built it way better. As our very knowledgeable Park Ranger explained to us, the Confederates were very familiar with the fort’s capabilities and never made an attack, saving Washington but relegating the fort to a somewhat forgotten history.

First off though, the whole place is pretty nice for what they’ve got. The fort itself is a small part of a very large park complex. We drove through most of it and it looks like an excellent place for picnics and the like. From the visitor’s center, the fort is accessed via a short path down a hill and across a wooden bridge. The bridge is a replacement for a drawbridge that used to be there, which must have been awesome in 1840. Despite a lack of drawbridge, the fort itself is still very impressive. It is built on a bluff overlooking the Potomac with hugely large walls constructed of imposing masonry. Inside the walls, we had pretty much free reign of the place. The two barracks buildings inside the fort’s courtyard were locked but on days when they have more rangers around one of them contains a display.

We started out looking into every single one of the fort’s many storerooms. One of them contains some bunks, for some reason, but none of the rest of them that are accessible contain anything. We checked. Ian was excited that the ranger later confirmed that the decaying wooden doors on them are in fact 1840s-era, so that was cool I guess. Up on top of the walls, however, the views were much nicer. Almost all of the cannons from Fort Washington have been removed, I’m sure to serve as decorative fodder for other places, and so you have a clear path to traverse all the various ramparts. Ian has made it a habit now to walk as much rampart as possible whenever we’re at a fort, so we took in the stunning views from every angle possible. Fort Washington has gorgeous panoramas of the Potomac. Looking up-river, you can make out the Washington Monument (we sure really liked that guy). Looking any which-way, you can watch sailboats and river cruisers lazily go by.

Fort Washington these days is also a nature park, and after we were done with the fort we took a stroll down the creatively named River Trail. Signs warned us to report any suspicious animal activity, so I made sure to keep an eye out for any suicide bomber raccoons. I think the most significant nature we saw were some geese paddling around in the river, which I guess might be slightly suspicious. We hiked down the River Trail for a little while, admiring the trees and quiet, and then eventually turned around. Fort Washington was a very nice place to visit and we managed to cover most of the highlights in about two hours. I walked away from the place thinking it was pretty under-loved. Take a visit and learn some history and give the Park Rangers something to do. They seemed like they could use the company.

The latest and greatest entry in my ongoing series “Pat and Ian Go Places When Ian Has the Day Off and Pat Continues to Be Unemployed” is our recent trip to the historic St. Mary’s City. I should get a job. Before that happens though, a brief intro to Maryland history.

The history of Maryland is long (for the US, anyways) and filled with exciting episodes like that one time we had a war with Pennsylvania, that other time people actually fought over the Severn, and a more awkward than most relationship with slavery. The story opens, however, with the founding of the colony that would become the greatest state in the union at St. Mary’s City on the northern shore of the St. Mary’s river. It’s a pretty standard colonial origin story, with dashes of escaping religious persecution, befriending the natives, and important things happening under trees. After about 70 years the capital was moved up to Annapolis and St. Mary’s was abandoned. Fast forward an additional three hundred or so years, and the city has become a major archaeological site you can visit on sunny days in May.

We headed out for our 2.5 hour drive around ten thirty and stopped for lunch on the way at Smokey Joe’s BBQ. We parked at St. Mary’s City visitor’s center to pay our entry fee and look at the artifacts they have on display. St. Mary’s City is apparently an archaeological training ground, so the city is pretty well documented as far as these places go. The visitor’s center gives a pretty efficient run-down of the history of the city. Artifacts on display include an old saker, which is apparently a type of cannon, a variety of pottery shards from the local tavern, and some examples of jewelry and sewing needles and the like. The rest of the city is explored via walking trails. “City” is a bit of a generous term in the modern sense and the whole place is about a mile from end to end.

The first area is a recreated Native American village. The nascent St. Maryites spent their first winter living in part of a Yaocomico village they purchased after some negotiations. Relations with the natives were reportedly very friendly, which is nice for a change of colonial pace. This portion of the city features prototypical huts with various implements on display within them. A very nice man in a polo shirt was explaining some of the finer points of native construction techniques, but Ian was too preoccupied with some of the other huts to let me listen very long. Also on display is a half-finished canoe, but filled with rainwater it looked more to me like someone should be looking for a convenient soap mine.

Next up on the path is a reconstructed Jesuit church. Throughout the city are faithful as possible recreations of the original structures. Some, like the church, were built with as original as possible construction techniques and materials, while others are a little less faithful but the discrepancies are noted. Also dotting the site are “ghost houses,” which are wooden frames of buildings as stand-ins for the originals to give you a sense of the density of the place. The church is fairly impressive, with one of the highlights being a glass section of the floor where you can look down and see the original lead coffins of Philip Calvert (the second Lord Baltimore’s brother), his wife Anne, and an unknown child, presumed to be from Phil’s second wife. They were returned to approximately their original locations (the modern reconstructed church is over the site of the historic one) after about 25 years of study and storage. In my old age I am sort of increasingly weirded out by putting dead people on display. I might be the crazy one. The coffins look nice though I guess?

Another highlight of the city is the oldest barn in Maryland. The sign for the barn is titled “Why is this Barn Here?” which is a little philosophical for my tastes but I’ll let it slide. The inside of the barn features displays about barn construction techniques and the details of tobacco packaging & shipping. As a proud Marylander, I am of course very familiar with tobacco farming, with tobacco farms being a standard for Elementary School field trips. At any rate this particular barn dates from 1785, putting it well within the farmland years of St. Mary’s City, but very historic nonetheless.

Walking north from the church brings you to downtown or our bustling historic metropolis. This are includes the most intricate display they have, with a large building representing Garrett Van Sweringen’s Council Chamber Inn. It was purportedly quite the posh place back in the day. You know it was nice because they have a sign denoting the fact that they found a large number of crab remains on the site, proving that Marylanders have been enjoying crab feasts from the start. Also on the back of the property is a coffee & brew house, and I mean with all these features in one spot why did they ever bother to go to Annapolis? This portion of the city also features the town store where you can look at old shoes and axe heads, as well as tour guides in period garb. These were my favorite kind of tour guides in period garb, where they don’t try to make you think you’ve somehow been transported back to 1650, and instead just tell you about whatever they got going while wearing some sweet duds.

They very pièce de résistance of the whole place (for Ian and I, anyway) is a recreated Dove. Although the colonists and their supplies were transported to the city on another ship, the 400-ton Ark, the colonists also brought over the Dove to give them some metaphorical wheels once the Ark departed. The modern Dove is a best-guess at what the original looked like, as the guides for the ship explain ad nauseum. It clocks in at 40 tons and strikes me as a pretty sturdy little ship, although the original was lost at sea on a trading voyage not too long after the colonists settled in. Although we didn’t get to see it when we were there, the Dove goes sailing about once a month to keep the crew exercised and trained.

The endpoint of the walking tour is another recreated building, Maryland’s first state house. The original state house was torn down after the city was abandoned, but the bricks were used to construct the Trinity Church which still stands next door, giving a tangible tie to the past, or whatever sounds poetic here. You can explore the statehouse, which is one of those large cool buildings, designed for hot summers before they invented air conditioning. Along with the church there is of course a graveyard, featuring some more old dead people, though not quite as old (but still as dead) as the lead coffins from earlier. In the graveyard is a marker declaring the position of the old mulberry tree where the colonists gathered to establish their city. Upon reaching this marker and reading the inscription, Ian declared that we were “done” with the city, and with that we turned around for the walk back to the car.

St. Mary’s City was a very nice place to visit. The weather was beautiful and those colonists really knew how to pick scenic riverside real estate. The displays and signs were very well done, and it is evident that the location is well cherished and cared for by the similarly named university next door. I think most people that visit Maryland will wind up in Baltimore or Annapolis, but down southern Maryland is really the state’s agricultural homeland and it is worth the trip.