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© 2004 Alison Harbaugh Introduction Essay for Maryland 24/7 The Infinite Shore By Jean E. Thompson What makes Marylanders tick? To find out, a cultural anthropologist might examine the contents of closet and cupboard: Navy blue blazer. Crab cake recipe. Rock salt. Insect repellent. Hair spray. Fear the Turtle sweatshirt. Straw hat. A paddle and a lacrosse stick. A political scientist might parse Maryland rhetoric: Preserve the Chesapeake Bay. Link far-flung towns and burgeoning bedroom communities with new transit, new highways. Support public education. Create jobs. Pay a living wage. Hold on-who's going to pay for that? Of course, a brutally honest assessment would come from a Fells Point manicurist. Take the boat out yesterday, did you? Cut your own Christmas tree? Crab feast last weekend? Putting in the tomatoes? The hands don't lie: Marylanders rarely stray far from the embrace of river, bay, or harbor, or from the warmth of the land that defines us. Our souls may have wings, but our roots are pure country. It's the subtext of so many stories-of the Baltimore cop who moonlights as a sunflower farmer; the executive who abandons the boardroom to sail around the world; the prosperous and poor alike who flock, in spite of flood risk, to communities along the state's infinite shore. The tiller of the soil, the toiler on the water: our twin muses. While rapidly paving over once-pastoral vistas to accommodate explosive growth, we miss our folkways and yearn for bygone gentility. In a century, half of the state's 48,000 farms vanished. Pastures yielded to townhouses and technology parks. Condos and tourist malls replaced the shipyards. Still, Marylanders want to get dirty or wet on the weekend-even city dwellers, who flock to the Inner Harbor, to community gardens and farmers' markets, to the State Fair and maritime festivals. The land and the Bay define our history. Every schoolchild learns that "The Star-Spangled Banner" was drafted on a warship in Baltimore Harbor. Flags always have been fashionable in Maryland. Harder to reconcile are our feelings about the Civil War. Maryland was a divided state, and hasn't gotten over it. Today, most descendants of slave and freeborn, slaveholder and abolitionist make polite neighbors and try to relegate the harsher memories to museum vaults. There are other, more pressing problems. Schools and housing are needed as immigrants from Central America, Mexico, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean arrive in the suburbs and cities. Mill towns like Luke are dying; crime threatens the jewel that is Baltimore. The new money is in electronic game design and biotech, not Beth Steel. Uncle Sam helps, by keeping us employed at Social Security, the Naval Academy, the National Security Agency, and various other bureaucracies tucked into wooded office parks. Sustaining Maryland's prosperity is our common challenge, from the far western Appalachian panhandle to the sand-swept Atlantic shore towns. Still, it takes more than this to unite so diverse a people. At the heart of the matter, it takes shared experience and shared memory-a collective appreciation for the golden promise of a Westminster cornfield; for the steely gray Potomac paved with ice; for spring's first crocuses blooming in a recycled tire cachepot on a Baltimore sidewalk and crimson crab shells discarded on butter-stained newsprint; for the silvery glint of Smith Island skipjacks clutching the wind on Chesapeake Bay. JEAN E. THOMPSON is an associate editor of the editorial page at The Baltimore Sun. She collects vintage labels from Maryland canneries. Browse    View All    The Infinite Shore    Hard at Work    Maryland at Play    Reason to Believe    Our Town Photos: 127 Photographers: 46 Towns: 41

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