Sleepy Creek
Far up the Potomac and a world away from the suburb of our childhood was our vacation farmhouse. A story for my nephew Ben.
If you were to start in the Chesapeake Bay and travel up the Potomac River, on your left you would pass Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington. Then you would pass the waterfront city of Alexandria, then the grand house of Robert E. Lee, turned into a national cemetery. On your right would be the city of Washington D.C. From the river, you would see the Jefferson Memorial and a few of the public buildings. Further on, you would pass Georgetown. Then the river would get rough and you would encounter some rapids and waterfalls known as Great Falls. This part of the river was familiar to Paul and me when we were kids, because this spot was eight or ten miles from our home in Rockville, Maryland. A few times a year, we would go to Great Falls for a day’s outing, to hike or to fish. We would climb on the rocks that overlooked the rapids and watch the kayakers dart down the sluice of rushing river.
Great Falls was the point on the Potomac where navigation stopped. Boats could not get past the falls except by taking the canal that was dug alongside the river. By way of the canal, barges could haul goods inland as far as Cumberland in western Maryland. The canal was dug one hundred seventy five ago and stopped operation about eighty years ago, so by the time Paul and I came upon it, it had long stopped operating and remained as just an historical park.
Continuing, the Potomac winds back and forth as it falls from its source in the west, all along the way dividing Virginia from Maryland. It goes past the Dickerson power plant, past Sugarloaf Mountain, and Brunswick. Then on the left side, Virginia quits and West Virginia takes over. Further the Potomac goes, toward the north and the west.
For ten years starting 1969, we lived in the split level house at 601 Twinbrook Parkway in Rockville. All nine of us were together when we moved in, so that house was cozy and cramped. The older three girls had rooms upstairs but your dad and Uncle Mathew and Aunt Lynn and I all shared the family room. By day, it was the family room. At night, we closed the doors and closed off from the rest of the house. We pulled out hide-a-way beds from the couches and converted it into a bedroom for four. We lived this way until the older three finally moved out and we got to fill the rooms upstairs.
In those days, I grew envious of some of my friends for the vacations they would take. Some would go off to rented houses at the beach. Such a vacation would have been too expensive for us. We did go to the beach a few times, but only for the day. Three hours out to the shore. Six hours on the beach on Assateauge Island, then three hours back. The thought that our parents would rent a house at Ocean City. . . that was an expensive thought.
But one summer, Mom and Dad did rent a house and we did go away for a week. Mom spied a small ad in the newspaper. A farmhouse was listed for rent by the week. The rent was low, so we could go. The rent was low owing to the fact that the house was not on the beach but was a distance inland. How low was the rent? The house was two hundred and forty miles inland. That low.
The farmhouse was in the town of Sleepy Creek, West Virginia. Where is that? I will tell you where Sleepy Creek is. Maryland makes a funny shape on the map. Maryland looks like a crab’s claw that is reaching to the right and down. If you go west, you come to the part of Maryland that narrows down until it is only three miles across, from north to south. That is where you will find the town of Hancock. To the north is Pennsylvania. To the south is the Potomac River and across the river is West Virginia. Go across the Potomac and turn left at the end of the bridge. The road runs for several miles downstream along a train yard and past an airstrip. Then it turns away from the river and through the tiny town of Sleepy Creek. There is not much there but a few houses and a few worn out old buildings. Through the town in a moment, we’d drive for some distance further to find the farmhouse that was advertised.
Old. Old was the smell of that farmhouse. The farmer was smart and built a modern house for his family and put the old house up for rent. The house had the closed up smell of mildew. In the closets were archives of books and magazines which fueled our entertainment on the rainy days. There were Readers Digest magazines from the 1950s. I loved to read old magazines for they opened a window on a time before mine. The fifties were the years when my older sisters were children and when my parents’ marriage was young. Ben, look at a newspaper from thirty years ago. Read the advertisements for the every-day items. Can you see how some things are still the same, yet other things have already become old and out of date? What new things are there in our world that the old newspaper knows nothing about?
There were no amusements ready-made for us and there were no other tourists in the surroundings of Sleepy Creek. Instead we found a hundred hidden amusements. A hundred different ways to walk through a field. Things to see we had never seen before. The farmer plowed up a row of potatoes in his garden. The plow blade sliced like a wave front through the soil and the soil rushed upward and poured around the curve of the blade as it passed. Potatoes churned to the surface, as brown as the dirt except gleaming white where the plow blade had nicked them. Back at home, boys our age might be fascinated watching an asphalt machine and an able crew put down smelly blacktop. At our farmhouse, we stood staring to see potatoes being churned from their hiding places.
There was no television to tempt us to stay up. Instead, not long after nightfall our energy would give out and we would be ready for bed. Our room was upstairs which meant we started the night laying on the top of the hot beds in the still air, hoping for a thunderstorm or at least a breeze. Unless there was to be a storm, there would come a period in the evening when the air calmed to stillness and hung idle about us. The heat would slowly dissipate out the wide open windows and we would become sensitive to the least breath of wind as we drifted to sleep. By the early morning, the air would have turned cool and heavy with dew and our covers, damp with the dew, would have found their way up and over us.
The very first light, even when it was still undetectable by us, would be announced by the throaty call of the farmer’s rooster. Roosters don’t crow just once, I learned then. But the first crow of the rooster was enough to convict Peter and it was enough to wake us boys.
We appropriated a vacation’s extra liberty and were permitted ourselves to go out of the house on our own. But we would not exit down the stairs and out the door lest we wake the others and risk our liberty. Instead, up would go the window and out would go the boys, out onto the roof of the porch. Down we could climb from the trellis to the railing below. I would go first. Then I’d help your father Paul and then Mathew. We’d cross the empty lane to the barn to watch the slopping of the pigs, the morning chore of the farmer.
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Let me tell you the things that would interest us on those tracks. First, we would find fallen insulators from the telegraph poles. Not the clear glass ones which were of no interest, but the old blue- or green-glass ones, the ones that went way back a hundred years and that had stood on those poles in service for all that time since. When you visit your aunts and uncles, you may still see as decoration in their houses some of the insulators we found on those walks. And we would find bones along the track. A skull was especially valued by us boys, or a complete set of interlocking vertebrae. And I cannot deny it was interesting to us, too, when we would discover a possum or a deer on the tracks that had recently been sliced neatly open.
O, the power and noise and rushing wind when a locomotive would charge past! The sudden illumination of the signal lights, if we happened to notice, would be the first indication of an approaching train. Then a distant rumble and throb of the diesel. Then up ahead of us – – or behind us! – – we’d see it. The single headlamp of the locomotive would bend into view. We would cheer and bound off to the side of the tracks to wave to the engineer and wait for the blast of the horn.
But on those tracks there was a special find that kept our interest that summer, the glass marbles. Walking on the tracks, on the oil soaked ties and stepping over the grime coated gravel and expelled slag, we spotted shiny glass marbles. The first one or two we took to be fluke discoveries. But we kept finding them as we walked on. They were large marbles, about three quarters of an inch in diameter, made of clear green glass, and bearing bubbles in their interior. We found them with such regularity that a long walk would fill our pockets until they bulged. We would walk the tracks with anticipation of the next find. Even if there were three people ahead of you on the tracks, the marbles had a way of escaping their attention and you would seem to have as good a chance of finding a marble as the person in the lead.
We never learned the real source of the marbles, but we think the most likely explanation is that they were the form in which rough-made glass was transported from the West Virginia glass-sand mines in that area to the refinery and that some of the marbles would work their way out of the hopper cars. For some years after our first discovery, our family would make occasional day trips to “walk the tracks” and would still find marbles. But no time in the last decade have I since found a marble on those tracks, even the special time a few years ago when I met your father in Hancock and we spent the whole day talking and part of the day on the tracks.
The road through the tiny town of Sleepy Creek passed a handful of residences and several old and unused commercial buildings. Abandoned fuel tanks, concrete footers and cinderblock walls say there was once more commercial activity and that this town had a purpose in the past. I’ve formed a theory from my experiences on the backroads. It seems to me that seven miles was the average distance between towns, at least for the eastern towns of the past. If you leave town on an old road, see if by seven miles you don’t come to another town or a stand of old buildings that look like they were once a market, a garage and a warehouse. Seven miles is seven minutes today. But a hundred years ago, it was two hours by foot, and not much less by wagon.
As the road left Sleepy Creek, it made a sharp curve around a grey weathered house that seemed to jut out into the roadway. This house had an instant attraction to us and demanded we explore. And so we came upon our second great pastime on that vacation, the exploration of abandoned houses.
It stood with dark empty windows, its exterior walls worn bare of all paint. Looking in the ground floor window, the interior had been thoroughly stripped of everything interesting. Around back we walked, pushing through the thick summer vegetation. Behind the house were stone steps that descended to a water-filled cellar. In a shed, we found the chassis of an ancient automobile, a Model A, with narrow, solid rubber tires and a flat windshield.
Navigating further around the house led us up a hill. We found a great iron kettle turned upside down. This was the kind of a cauldron that would have been used in the old days for making soap or for washing laundry or for rendering lard. This kettle you will recognize, for we took it with us. It had stood suspended from a tripod on the side of Grandma Martha’s house.
The second story of the house could be entered from the hill. And this floor of the house had no stairway communicating with the first floor. While the first floor had been picked through by any number of people who had entered it by the road, the second floor was still full of articles of life and work. The first room we entered was full of tools for farming and for beekeeping. The further room had farm supply catalogs and beekeeping magazines and personal letters and business letters all dating from the 1890’s to the 1940s. We found in this room an elaborate decorative brick with images of flowers and deer, the date “1894” and the following name and address “Rev. M. L. Maysilles. 61. W. 3. Street. Frederick. MD.” which I have kept since. (I lived in Frederick and there is no longer any such address.) A special find: two one pound cans of saltpeter, which I took home and put to good use, but which I will leave to your father’s discretion to explain.
Abandoned houses were my time machines. Coming upon a pile of debris left behind by the thieves and vandals, I would poke it apart with a stick until it gave up its story. One house we came upon that year had just before us been broken into, its door hanging wide open. In we went. On the wall, a calendar hung, testifying “1956”. Jars and bottles were still in the refrigerator. The contents of the dresser drawers had been dumped on the beds. Prodding with a stick, I found a driver’s license from 1938, a meat ration coin from WWII, and a pair of false teeth. I think your father now has an antique Victorola cabinet. Did you ever wonder where it came from? Yes, here.
This was our Sleepy Creek vacation. I’ve since vacationed at the beach. But the beach resort is noise and crowd. You can’t climb out onto the porch in the morning and you can’t walk on the tracks in solitude and spy a treasure overlooked by others. The stores on the boardwalk don’t teach you about your father’s time and the time before him. But say “Sleepy Creek” and I remember those dewy mornings and I can see my parents and brothers and sisters up ahead of me on the tracks.
(C) 2005 Bryan Dubois