This spring, re-enter a more elemental time. Rising moon, May or June, a third of a billion years ago. Sunset gleams in the lap of saltwater on sandy shore. Today’s continents have not formed. Birds and trees, even dinosaurs are 100 million years or more in the future.
The tide swells, stars emerge, and just offshore a dark spike of a tail punctures the surface, followed by dozens, thousands. It’s a scene set since the oldest mountains were forming: horseshoe crabs, an impossibly ancient species, each spring emerging from the deeps, massing by the millions, bulldozing their way onto beaches to lay their eggs.
The Nansemond River is a paddler’s paradise sitting on the edge of Norfolk’s westward sprawl. Here, the adventuresome will find more than 4,000 acres of wetlands, national wildlife refuge lands and a water trail that is steadily gaining new canoe and kayak launch sites. Plus, centuries of history enliven the river’s banks.
Stand on Mount Vernon’s back porch and look out across the Potomac River. The nearly unbroken sweep of woods and farm fields is very similar to that which George and Martha Washington would have seen any spring day in the 18th century.
That this beautiful and historic view is nearly intact is no accident. Protecting it required the foresight to recognize the threat that the fast growth in the suburban DC area posed to the view from Mount Vernon, and it took hard work by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and an act of Congress to address it. The solution was Piscataway Park, created specifically to preserve the view from George Washington’s house.
The Appomattox River valley in central Virginia’s Piedmont has two relatively new — but very different — state parks that are forever linked by the battles fought at each during the days before Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House.
The Chesapeake Bay has drawn travel and trade for thousands of years, its tidal rivers and natural harbors connecting people with others across the region and across the world. But, farther upstream, the waters that feed the Bay are less cooperative.
Historically, people in these areas have been less interested in traveling by water. They mostly just wanted to cross it. During the 1800s, covered bridges were a popular solution.
Don Shomette was about 10 years old in when he first encountered the “ghost fleet” of Mallows Bay.
He was aboard a jon boat with his father and brother, coming down the Potomac River from a shoreline campsite in the mid-1950s. It was a gray morning. The water was churning and visibility was poor. On the river, they met an old waterman setting out crab pots who asked if they were trying to find the ghost fleet.
Some people’s default position is active-outdoors mode. They have kayaks strapped to the roofs of their cars and paddles in their backseats. They know all of the Chesapeake’s put-in points. They have maps, optimized Smartphones and an eye for identifying birds. They are the people for whom the Subaru commercials are made.
Then there are people who like being outside, but are a bit intimidated to paddle the Bay and its tributaries without a leader. They fear getting lost, or dehydrated or just tired. They want someone to tell them what is that pretty plant over here, what is the name of that bird over there. And, if at all possible, at some point during the outdoors-filled day, they would like to have a glass of wine and take a nap.
If you want to paddle where few have paddled on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Monie Bay with its three marked water trails — and potential for freelance exploring — is worth a day trip.
The paddler sign-in log where we put in near Deal Island, about 20 miles south and west of Salisbury, had one other name, from more than a year before us.
As river trail maps and smartphone apps continue to pop up around the Chesapeake, the river atlases produced by the Virginia Canals and Navigations Society at first glance seem anachronistic.
But what makes these atlases special is their devotion to the era when the craft of choice to move tob