St. Clement's Island

A few weeks ago, the Washington Post wrote up four local day-long drives intended to rekindle the romance between you and your loved one. Thinking it a good idea, J. and I embarked on one of them on Saturday. I think J. and I lack in the romance department sometimes, but a bigger problem is that I don't find driving very romantic. Well, maybe if you're driving a Morgan Plus 4 through the Welsh countryside. For the most part, though, we had a good time.

The weather was beautiful, and after a leisurely breakfast at home we crossed the Wilson Bridge into Maryland in late morning and headed South on MD-210. Traffic lightened up quickly, and before long we were meandering leisurely through Charles County, grateful that the leaves were finally starting to turn color. The Post's directions were lousy – MD-229 does not cross MD-225 as they claim, it dead-ends there – but with the help of a normal map we reached our first stop – the Thomas Stone Historic Site in Port Tobacco – without too much trouble. Stone was a Maryland lawyer turned revolutionary and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He bought the house and the surrounding 300+ acres in 1770 and lived there with his family during and after the Revolutionary War. The house remained privately owned and inhabited into the 1990s, the National Park Service took over and, after repairing damage from a fire in the 1970s, made it into a Historic Site in 1997. The house is well-maintained, with four rooms on the first floor open to the public and furnished with period furniture (though none of it Stone's own), but in the grand scheme of things there is nothing special about it. Other than having signed the Declaration, Stone was an unremarkable guy, and none of the grandeur or historical significance visible at Monticello or Mount Vernon was evident here. The Post's description of the estate's park-like grounds was also overstated, so after a a ten-minute tour of the house, we swallowed down our lunch at a picnic table carelessly placed on the edge of the visitors' parking lot, and hit the road. During our entire time at the site, we were the only visitors.

Our final destination was Colton's Point where a water taxi would take us to St. Clement's Island in the mouth of the Potomac. The only glitch was that the taxi sails to the island only twice a day, the second trip being at 2:30, and the windy country roads, scenic as they are, do not make for quick progress. The vague directions conspired against us once more, so the last ten miles or so were a little harried, to put it mildly, as I gunned the old VW to seventy and beyond in 45-mph zones (on nearly treadless tires no less). We squealed into Colton's Point at 2:30 sharp only to discover that we need not have rushed – we were the only passengers, and thus could leave pretty much at our leisure. After the short ride out to the island, we made arrangements to be picked up on the opposite side in an hour, and set off to explore.

Turns out the 40-acre island was the site of the first landing, in 1634, by English settlers in today's Maryland. It also turns out that the site is of great significance to the Catholic church – Cecil Calvert, the son of George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, was Catholic, and the first Catholic mass in “English America” (don't you love the clever ways to dismiss the Spanish?) was celebrated here upon his arrival. The island has undergone many changes of ownership and even name over the centuries. A lighthouse had once stood here; it was destroyed by a Confederate raiding party during the Civil War, rebuilt, then used for target practice by the US Navy after being decommissioned in the 1930s. It is currently being rebuilt again to its original look to serve, presumably, as an educational exhibit. We wandered leisurely around the island, making our best attempt at romance and wishing that we had brought our picnic here – tables abounded along the wide trail that circled the perimeter of the island. It was wonderfully quiet and peaceful, albeit a bit buggy. We eventually made our way to the North end of the island where two ham radio operators the boat's captain told us about – the only other humans there – were packing up their gear for the return trip. The boat showed up shortly afterwards and we made our way back to the mainland, learning a random bit of trivia in the process – sea planes have the lowest right-of-way priority of any vessel on the water.

We drove home by retracing our steps more or less, though taking a bit of a shortcut along US-301 and stopping for a bag of fresh mussels for that night's dinner. When we got home, I threw the mussels in the pot, pan-seared a couple of salmon fillets that were languishing in our freezer, opened a bottle of deliciously fruity though slightly sugary Albariño, and we settled down to the most romantic moment of the day.