Our Trip to Tangier Island

A long long time ago, when I first went to college as a piano major, we were required to sing in the chorus. Then all of the chorus members were strongly encouraged to be in the onstage chorus of the opera. My very first one was Faust and I loved it. I went on to be in Pearl Fishers, Carmen, and during my last year my friend JoAnn and I played celeste together down in the pit in a newly composed opera by Gerald Muller called Joshua. It was based on the life of a preacher on Tangier Island, out in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, who had been required to lead prayer services for the British troops on their way up to bomb Baltimore in the War of 1812. The music was exciting and the story was rather interesting. It left me hoping to one day visit Tangier Island myself.

I had kind of forgotten all about that until I read this post from Capital Spice, which described their recent trip to Tangier Island in great detail. I decided I HAD to go there this summer, and a few weeks ago I finally did. If you want to visit Tangier, definitely go read their post - it has all of the necessary links for transportation and lodging. We basically replicated their trip except that we arrived late in the day and stayed for two nights.

It was a great getaway, and could have been totally relaxing except that we spent the entire day we were there riding bikes, paddling kayaks, and walking around all over the place. The island is really small so we just rode around everywhere about six times. They don't have or need cars on Tangier, but nearly every family there has a golf cart. Some of them keep a car on the mainland.

Most of the people who live on Tangier Island are descendants of the original families and we saw the same last names over and over in all of the various grave sites. It was interesting to hear the rather unique accents - they all had the same features, but in varying combinations and amounts. What I mostly heard was British sounding vowels, combined with some of the inflections and rhythms and articulations of Baltimore. I had a nice conversation with one little five year old boy who was already tending to his very own crab cages and he definitely sounded more British than anything else.

So we took the late afternoon ferry from Onancock, VA which is just over an hour south of Salisbury, MD off of Route 13. We got in to Tangier around 7 pm, checked in to Hilda Crockett's guesthouse, went out for dinner, walked around some, got ice cream, and then went to sleep.

The next day we had the huge and delicious breakfast, went for a bike ride, split a softshell crab sandwich, went to the museum, went kayaking, ate the huge and delicious lunch/dinner at Hilda Crockett's, rode bikes some more, walked down to get some ice cream, and then went to bed so early that we were able to squeeze in another bike riding session before our 7am departure the next day.

Since we were so far south we decided to go to the beach at Chincoteague. It was beautiful and I'd go there more often if it were closer and didn't have so many ferocious flies. After we were done with the beach we drove home.

And here are the pictures - you can click on them if you want to see a larger version:

Onancock Wharf, where we caught the ferry

Some of the many crab shacks we saw on the way in to Tangier

The town, from the water

The softshell crab sandwich

The Reverend Joshua Thomas

Hilda Crockett's guesthouse

an old abandoned house

another old abandoned house

more crab shacks

crab cages

bird houses

snails

a white heron

a blue heron

local kittens

the birds at Chincoteague

goose update

Nature has dealt a cruel blow to the pair of geese that I've been obsessing about since the middle of May when I first saw their nest. They laid their eggs on a tiny island in the middle of a drainage pond and unfortunately the water level fluctuates quite a bit. The mother was apparently still in the midst of laying her eggs because she would occasionally leave the nest for short periods of time. It looks like there are two or three eggs in there. I read that once the goose lays all of her eggs she doesn't leave the nest until they've hatched. So hopefully she had a few more to go.

When we got all that rain last week the island was nearly completely under water. I took this picture around noon on Tuesday.

Later that evening the geese came back and they just stood there motionless while we looked at them. It was pretty sad. I don't think they had quite figured out what they should do next. I know how that feels. The water had subsided a little bit. I was sure that the nest had washed away and unfortunately freshly laid goose eggs don't float.

I checked again on Wednesday but they weren't there. I think they are probably gone for good. Maybe they found a new place to lay the rest of their eggs.

On Thursday I went back one last time. The water level was back where it had been the very first time I saw the nest. The twigs of the nest actually looked like they had survived the flooding, but the eggs are gone. So I guess I won't be seeing any one day old goslings swimming around in this pond anytime soon. I hope that she had a couple more eggs to drop and she found a safer place to build her new nest.

Life is so random sometimes. Since I became a freelancer I've learned that it's all just part of the package. You just deal with whatever comes your way, however good or bad or strange it happens to be. We lost our home four years ago and we're still rebuilding it. That disrupted a rather nice steady employment situation that I gratefully enjoyed for four years.

Then I was given a wonderful opportunity to finish my M.M. degree. On the very first day of school I got a call for a three month jazz trio gig in Dubai. That is exactly the kind of thing that I have always wanted to do but hadn't really pursued so that was very random. I was bummed that I couldn't do it and I saved that message on my phone for the entire school year. The year of school was wonderful though and well worth doing.

While I was at graduation I got a call to do a three month ship gig in the Mediterranean, which I can't do yet because I need to stay home and finish building my house. And exactly one week after getting a masters in jazz studies I suddenly and inexplicably find myself having a bunch of classical gigs, including a performance of the Mozart Requiem and a recording session for a new requiem by a local composer.

I guess I'll be thinking about those poor little unborn goslings while I play these pieces. I'll be thinking about other friends too. But now it's time to stop with all the philosophizing and go cut the damn grass which is super long once again.

big day today

This morning I had to get up super early so that I could attend the music department's graduation ceremony at 9AM. It's hard to believe that this school year is over. It went by pretty fast. I am so grateful for having been given the opportunity to finish my M.M. degree with the help of a teaching assistantship. I definitely wouldn't have been able to afford it otherwise. And I loved the teaching part at least as much as I did the learning part. I am also grateful to all of my teachers who I learned so much from during all of this. They inspired me to work hard enough to graduate with straight A's! So yay them and yay me!

Now that I'm finished with school I can finally get back to building my house. So maybe that goal will also be accomplished this year - who knows? I got called for another ship gig (in the Mediterranean) yesterday, but I can't do that again until my house is finished, which is a bummer. But for now, finishing our house and moving back in is my number one goal.

However my more immediate goal (for the next hour) is to rest up for two back to back gigs this afternoon and evening. Have a great weekend!

She's thinking "Wow, I finally finished something!"

Foul and Fowl

These were the two themes of my recent weekend in Asheville, NC. It all began on a miserably rainy and cold Thursday night. We left after rush hour and drove part of the way there. We made a junk food stop at the Sheetz in Salem, VA and a five pack of Peeps seemed like an appropriate snack. That is until the guy rang them up and I saw this:

If you can't read what the cash register says, click on the picture!

I temporarily lost my appetite after that so I ate them the next day instead. And speaking of Peeps, you must check out the World's Cutest Peep Post at [F]oxymoron's blog. It's absolutely adorable! Go look!

On Friday we were driving through the beautiful mountains of southern Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. I pulled over at a "scenic overlook" and took a picture of the foggy mountains. The view was more subdued than usual.

On Saturday while Doug was doing his workshop at UNC Asheville, I did a little exploring. I went up Town Mountain Road to see what I could see. It was rainy and foggy but there were still fun things to see, like:

A castle!

And turkeys! I almost ran over the first batch of them because I driving just a little too fast on that winding mountain road. They were all over the road like worms on a sidewalk. I saw about twenty of them altogether at various times. As you can see in this video, they don't move very fast.

One of them kept ruffling his feathers at me.

And then he farted at me. Or at least that's what it sounded like.

Speaking of farting, on Sunday I took Doug up there to show him the turkeys on our way out of town. It was sunny for about an hour and there were suddenly no turkeys to be found anywhere. Maybe they only go near the road when the weather is crappy. In spite of the weather everything was in full bloom down there in Asheville.

By the time we got to Lexington Virginia I was getting really bored with the interstate scenery so I decided to see where one of the side roads went. We went by VMI and Washington and Lee and then continued down that road for a while and tried a few others, just for fun. Getting lost on purpose is my idea of a good time. You never know where you'll end up.

The road wound around in what seemed like a big circle. It went across a river, over some mountains and through a forest, past a graveyard and some farms, and it even became a dirt road for a while.

Eventually we found our way back to the highway again. But not before coming across one additional turkey.

So it was indeed a foul and fowl weekend. At least it was as far as the weather, and the various birds were concerned.

so busy....

My blogs have kind of fallen by the wayside recently, and now that I finally have a free minute, I guess I might as well throw up some pictures (since I seem to also have diarrhea of the camera) and try to remember what I've been doing for the last week.

The trip to Atlantic City last Friday was quick but fun. My friend MyCatTom and I yakked away for the entire trip up and the entire trip back which made the drive seem really short. We rehearsed in the afternoon and did the concert that night. The various "Swingettes" came from DC, NY, Philadelphia, North Carolina, and Atlantic City. I enjoyed playing with all of them. There wasn't much free time, but I was able to hobble on down to the beach. It was unbelievably cold and windy there. On the way home the road was extremely well-lit by an enormous full moon.

The things you can buy in New Jersey!

Why is the beach so pink?

I guess I was walking around in the Red Light District

We saw this on the way home. Too bad they were closed!

The Messiah rehearsal and concert over on Kent Island last weekend went well. But I had to get up at the crack of dawn, which not exactly my favorite time of day.

Sunrise on the Severn

This must be the Great Wye Oak's great grandson.

I'm totally finished with school for the semester. I really enjoyed teaching my class, but I'm glad I don't have to do it next semester because my own course load is going to be much larger than it was this fall.

I'm playing a musical adaptation of Theodore Roethke's poem "The Waking" for December graduation at UMD tomorrow. Just me and a singer. She has a beautiful voice and it's a pretty cool piece. The bass part works great in the original "guy" key but the transposed bass part lies in a kind of awkward and less resonant area of the bass, so there's no way to make it sound as good as the recording. Even the bass player on the recording would not be able to sound as good in the key I'm doing it in. So that's a little frustrating, but I think the over all effect will still be nice. I haven't played in a hall as big as the Comcast Center for a few years so I'm looking forward to that as well. We had the soundcheck this morning and the sound guy is great. I'm digging the reverb - a lot! Anyway, here's the original version of the piece, in the original, more resonant key.

a little bit sad it's almost over

School is winding down now. My classes are finished and all I have left is giving the final exam, which I've already finished writing, to my improv class next Monday. Once I finish grading the projects and the exams I'll be done. I loved teaching this course and I'm actually going to miss it next semester in spite of how much work it was to prepare for it each week. It's nerve-wracking to do something like this for the first time but I really enjoyed organizing the material into a semester long program and planning all of the various activities that would reinforce the stuff that I presented. The students seemed to think that it was challenging but fun and they all made good progress. It was a very satisfying experience and I'm glad I had the opportunity to teach it.

We are going to be working like crazy on our house for the next six weeks because Doug thinks we can have it finished by the final inspection deadline. I've fallen for that kind of talk before. We'll see....

This weekend I've got a gig in Atlantic City with an all girl band called the "Swingettes." I'm carpooling up with a friend from here and we will be playing with other people we know from NYC and Philadelphia. That should be fun. Except that I've got a Messiah rehearsal the next morning that I have to rush home for, and it's on Kent Island. And then there's the rest of the weekend. It's fun to be busy with non-construction type activities though. My hands like that a lot.

Tennessee Tour

We left late Wednesday night last week for a little mini-tour which involved a lot of driving but was also a lot of fun. We had some gigs with a Benny Goodman/Peggy Lee tribute show that started in Cleveland, TN on Thursday and ended in Bluefield, WV last night. The headliners were from Boston, and most of the rest of the band was from the Knoxville area except for a drummer from North Carolina.


I had most of the day off on Friday so I did some exploring in the Knoxville area, but it was so cold that I spent the entire morning goofing off in a coffee shop in downtown Knoxville before heading out in my car to check out the rest of the downtown area and some sections south of town. I attempted to go for a walk by a lake. It was a pretty lake but too cold for me so I finished the day back at the coffee shop.




One thing I noticed while hanging out there was that a lot of the customers had nose piercings, which is fine, but they weren't the usual single stud or loop on the side of the nose - instead a lot of them had a piercing through the middle that looped down and ended in two balls, with one coming out of each nostril. Maybe it was the weather, but I started thinking that it looked like they all had silver snot hanging out of their noses. Now that's a whole lot more attractive than real snot so I'm actually kind of glad it was silver. But ewww, what if you had a piercing like that and suddenly had to blow your nose?


When I went to pick up Doug I got to see the amazing restoration and remodeling work that Vance and Emily are doing on their house way up on a hill overlooking the Tennessee River and downtown Knoxville. The style of the inside of their house is exactly how I want mine to look if we ever get to that point. Emily has done most of the molding work herself and has even built a few couches! Now I almost feel like trying that. Almost. Anyway it was very inspiring, and cool to see how good some of the things I had been envisioning actually look in a real house.
(A real house, as opposed to a Foam Core Fantasy).

We drove about an hour east to the Sevierville area to spend the night at Tom's house which is on top of a ridge way out in the woods in the Great Smoky Mountains. His driveway was about a half mile of this:

Kind of exciting in a Deliverance sort of way!

Tom's house reminded me of a ski lodge - very rustic but very nice. Doug said it was sort of log cabin style construction. If so, it was the most luxurious log cabin I've ever been in. The weather was appropriately cold - it got down to 17 degrees that night. Tom's girlfriend Teresa made an incredibly delicious dinner for us and also breakfast the next morning. Then we caravaned up to the gig in West Virginia.

Tom was nice enough to find an orchard store that we could stop at on the way that had Doug's favorite apple, the Arkansas Black, in stock so we bought an entire bushel of them.

They got quite a bit of snow down there in southeastern West Virginia, but the roads were fine.

This mountain didn't photograph very well because of the glare of the sun - be sure to shield your eyes!

an extra day in New York

The plan for the next day was to get up, check out of the hotel, get my car before the street cleaning deadline, drive downtown to pick up my bass, and then head home. But I was really enjoying my solitude so I decided to see if my room was available for an additional night. It wasn't, but they did have a different room so I decided to stay. I opened the curtains and looked out the window. The view included a brick wall about four feet across from the window and this plastic owl:

I guess he was there to scare other birds away.

I had to check out and register separately for another room so I left my bag in the checked baggage room and got to my car about 10 minutes late. It was the only car left on that side of the street and I guess I lucked out not getting a ticket or getting towed.

As I was heading back uptown after picking up my bass I suddenly, on a whim, decided to see if I could drive to Coney Island. It was about noon and my room wouldn't be available until 2:00 and I was already in my car, so what the hell. Except that I've never been to Coney Island and the only thing I knew about its location was that it is on the ocean in Brooklyn. Since I have a decent sense of direction and had plenty of time to kill, I wasn't too worried. If I couldn't find it, I'd see other stuff instead.

I turned right on Canal Street and went over the Manhattan Bridge and that became Flatbush Avenue. I've seen that street on subway cars so I thought so far, so good. I'm not lost yet. It went by Prospect Park, which I'd heard of. It looks like a beautiful park and it's big - maybe it's Brooklyn's answer to Central Park. So far Brooklyn seemed really nice - it's kind of more like DC than Manhattan in a way. At least what I'd seen of it so far. At this point I had no idea whether I was heading towards Coney Island or not, but I was perfectly happy driving on Flatbush Avenue for no particular reason.

Right after Prospect Park I saw Ocean Avenue and figured that was the ticket and it did seem to go in the right direction. It went for a long way through some beautiful old neighborhoods with really great architecture. I passed an absolutely gorgeous old synagogue called Midland or Midfield. Unfortunately my camera was in the back of my car and it was raining so I didn't get a picture. Then I saw Avenue M, N, O, and P, and was getting all excited that I'd see Avenue Q (I've seen "Avenue Q" but not the actual street) but there was a Quentin Street or something and then it went back to Avenue R, etc. I thought that was pretty rude.

Anyway I took Ocean Avenue all the way to where it sort of bumped into a harbour and I turned left on Emmons Avenue but it ended after a few blocks. The area I was in was called Sheepshead Bay.

So I turned around and headed south. I turned left at the next road that I thought went east and that finally took me to the ocean. I parked and walked up to the boardwalk there. I was surprised to discover that nearly everyone was speaking Russian. I used to play in a balalaika orchestra and I've been to St. Petersburg a few times so I know what Russian sounds like. It definitely was not Yiddish. Also, people were dressed the same way they do in St. Petersburg - kind of more dressed up than you'd ordinarily expect to see at the beach. Anyway, I discovered that I was in Brighton Beach and Coney Island was farther south on the same boardwalk.

But it was cold, windy, and a little bit damp, and my still-recovering foot was not feeling that great so I got back in my car and drove a little farther south. About half of the stores had signs with Russian letters and no English letters. This one had both:

I didn't really realize there were actual Russian neighborhoods in Brooklyn - because I don't know anything about Brooklyn! So I'm already making some cool discoveries on my little trip to Coney Island. I guess previously I thought all of the Russians mostly lived in Jewish neighborhoods, which shows how little I've actually thought about where Russian immigrants might live. Because, obviously not all Russian immigrants are Jewish. Duh!!! Anyway the balalaika players in DC certainly don't all live in the same neighborhood.

I still had my bass in the car and the neighborhood did not exactly have what I would describe as a crime-free vibe, but I managed to find a parking space that offered a little psychological protection, if nothing else:

I didn't see a police station, but there sure were alot of police cars parked there. Now this is the kind of building I was really expecting to see:

And especially this one, which is where I ate lunch of course!

They grill their hot dogs so they have delicious little burned places on them. I got one with sauerkraut and mustard. Yum! After lunch I went to the beach:

And then to Astroland. Everything was pretty deserted. Since I was having a deliberately antisocial trip, I kind of enjoyed that. I would have ridden on these rides if they'd been open. But I think I read somewhere that some of the main rides in Coney Island have recently closed for good. That's a real shame.

Since the weather was so dark and dreary I was not able to obey this sign:

I decided to see where the "Belt" Parkway went when it was time to head back to Manhattan. I lucked out once again. It went near Governer's Island where I stayed once when Doug was in the Air Force, and then there was a tunnel to Manhattan that I didn't even know existed which eventually became the West Side Highway. So that was super convenient. I didn't find any street parking so I parked in a garage instead. When I got back to my hotel my new room was ready and it had completely different scenery out of its window:

To the left

And to the right

I went up to the TKTS place and got a half price ticket to see Gypsy which was excellent, but very long. The kids in the show were fantastic. The orchestra was fantastic and it was great to see them behind the stage for the overture and entracte. Patti Lupone's Mama Rose was very different from Rosalind Russell's. She really made it her own. I'm not sure if I liked it better, but I did enjoy the fact that it was different. Her voice was a little distracting because the tone quality varied widely throughout her range. She had a lot of breaks. But it was all in tune. The final scene where she kind of goes nuts was intense and powerful and her tonal quality was all of a sudden extremely consistent. Maybe her voice only works really well at super loud volumes.

After the show I went down to Knickerbocker's and heard JoAnne Brackeen and Cecil McBee. They were wonderful as usual.

The next day I headed home. The clouds began to clear away the second I crossed into Maryland. Doug said the weather had been warm and sunny the entire time I was gone. But that's okay. The weather in NY was a better match for my frame of mind during the time I was there.