Notes from the Happy Hour Creek Armada

And Other Things I Didn't Write In The Magazine

Wine!

Cheese!

Green lawns and sandals and little bunches of grapes!

I am surrounded by artists under a white tent next to a boat-filled marina. Easels are set up on the grass, displaying hazy summer renderings of the Chesapeake Bay. In the high west, the sun is a perfect orange circle.

An old man stands at the microphone. He’s wearing suspenders over flannel. His khaki shorts open at the knee to receive a prodigious and calf-engulfing mileage of white cotton socks.

He is talking about his dead wife. “She may not have been the best painter around,” he sighs, “but I sure did love her.”

The audience provides a sympathetic murmur. It is widely accepted that although the dead themselves are off-limits, one may at least speak ill of their art.

I know already that this man will not make it into my coverage of the Annapolis plein air painting festival reception. His knee socks are too high, for one. And he is peripheral to the interests of my readership. I work for a waterfront lifestyle magazine. What do boaters care for widowers and their unskilled wives?

I must write about the Chesapeake Bay and the Chesapeake Bay only. I have never done this before. I am an intern, and my experiential paycheck has not yet arrived. Baby’s first byline has no room for recreational wordmongering, so I’ll have to get my kicks here instead. Buckle up! I’ve been reading Tom Wolfe!

Back to the art festival.

There are two recognizable demographics at this reception. Here is the upper boating class, in their best linen whites and blues. Lily Pulitzer and Tommy Bahama. They are ready to buy art. Here are the artists. They are wearing jeans and sundresses and enjoying their wine.

It’s a social order as old as the Renaissance— patrons and artists. Buyers and makers. Boaters and painters. The artists can look however they want, as long as they do beautiful things. The patrons can do whatever they want, as long as they look beautiful.

I am some third, alien creature called The Media. I can do whatever I want and I don’t have to look beautiful.

The magazine in question.

The other day, I was the only one in blue jeans at a press release. Big mistake. That business-casual Gazette intern with her notepad and snappy questions probably would not have irked me so much if I’d eaten breakfast.

As it was, I wandered around feeling like a shy kid in a room of adults until I pulled myself together and reminded myself what I was supposed to be doing (getting the scoop). Notebook in hand, I approached an environmental researcher and asked him why the water in the Chesapeake Bay is so murky. He told me it’s a scientific mystery.

Having stumped him, I left the building. On to the next line of interrogation.

OYSTERS!!!!!

Oysters are good for EVERYTHING and EVERYONE. This is a very important topic to consider. Are they okay? Are there more of them? Where? Is the water clean? Ask the DNR about their projects with the ORP and AHB, which partnered with the CBF, and don’t get the acronyms mixed up. Read the press release carefully. 26.5 million juvenile oysters? In 2023? What’s the update on that project? Let’s talk about the cargo ship that ran aground in 2022. Looking forward to hearing back. What’s your deadline for that piece?

Oyster shoals are good for fish and crabs. They are good for the water. They are good for the economy.

“Cultch” is a term that refers to old, ground-up oyster remains.

I personally hate the taste of oysters. They are like the boogers of the sea. I will not include this fact.

The Media photographs important people at a press release. Some of them are knowledgeable about oysters.

My inner humanist wants every piece to be a feature story, so I keep accidentally conducting 30-minute interviews for 500-word articles. Most of the transcripts end up as flotsam on the shores of editorial discretion, never to be seen again.

Thus, nobody will know the voyeuristic pleasure artists get from painting peoples’ windows late at night. Or the back pain a 65-year-old woman feels after hurling one million juvenile oysters into the Chesapeake Bay.

But some pearls of wisdom deserve to be thrown, even if it is before you boatless swine. “Sometimes I think it’s selfish to be an artist,” one painter told me, “But this is a vocation for me, not a hobby. It’s a passion, not a play. The best thing I can do is to do it.”

Freeman Dodsworth stood on the sidewalk with his easel under an umbrella, painting the yellow flowers in someone’s front yard. His conversation had a morbid streak. “They’ll find me collapsed in front of my easel one day, and that’s how I’ll go out. If I were to write an autobiography— which I’m not— I would call it Painting Myself to Death.”

CUT! There’s no death in a lifestyle magazine!

Palden Hamilton, working on a painting of the abandoned weed shop at the bottom of my street.

I am walking home from work beside the marina. The days are getting hot. A sailboat tilts suggestively in the turbid water, tempting the wind.

I have spent my day at the magazine thinking about boats. My commute is delayed by the raising of a bridge to allow the passage of several more boats. The people on these boats are shiny and tan. I wish I had a boat, I think.

Providence throws me a very small bone:

At 5:00 pm I find myself, beer in hand, sitting on a paddleboard tied to an inflatable raft tied to another paddleboard tied to the back of a canoe, traversing a (mysteriously) murky tributary of the Severn River with a group of friends. Laughter abounds. What we lack in yachts we make up for in National Bohemians.

I’ll buy a boat some other time. This is the Happy Hour Creek Armada. Write that down!