We heard a crash of branches, a loud thump, and stopped our bikes, startled, to see a squirrel bounce into the air from a pile of fallen leaves. It landed on the ground a second time, contorted its body until it was on its feet, froze, as if stunned, and then scampered back up the tree it had fallen out of. My five-year-old said “What the -” and we erupted in laughter, surprised by the moment. “Mama,” he said as we started pedaling again, “he must’ve thought he was a flying squirrel.” He shook his head. “But he is definitely not.”
This moment was one in a string of early morning encounters with the wildlife in our neighborhood, all of them rewards for being so high strung that we’d rather ride our bikes than drive to my son’s school bus stop a mile and a half away. The animals of our streets tended to come around to high five us for this choice - a painted turtle crossing the path we cut through our neighbor’s backyard, a mama doe and her two fawns in a different front yard every morning, a crow that made us shriek with laughter when it landed on a branch over our heads, dumping giant drops of last night’s rain down the backs of our necks.
In the weeks we were settling into the adventure of these early morning bike rides, I was poring over James Michener’s Chesapeake. Like much of Michener’s work, Chesapeake is a meticulously researched tome of a novel, tracing the history of centuries through a single place and a few of the families that lived and died there. A soaring 865 pages grounded in the Eastern Shore of Maryland, it immerses the reader in the stories of real people with real goodness and real flaws, and how they navigate the vastly complicated societal, religious, political, environmental, and moral problems of each century. In the course of weeks, my soul grappled with the death of the native Patamokes (“Must we burn our forests for London?”), the persecution of Quakers and Catholics, the breaking birth of the United States, the disgusting reality of the salve trade, the war of a nation because of it, the joys and tragedies of oystermen at sail, the relationships between hunters, their dogs, and their fowl, and the damage caused by abandoning one’s home for the empty promises of global wealth and power.
A theme throughout the novel is the tension between being a person of ideas and a person of action. It’s easy for me to get pulled into frustration that living in abstractions is unique to our time of digital personhood, that our modern age has a monopoly on time wasted arguing with people we can’t see over the merits of ideas whose realities we’ve never experienced. Chesapeake reveals this human tendency repeatedly over the course of centuries, and illustrates the virtue of grounding oneself not only to real, flesh-and-blood people, but also to the real rhythms of the nature we immediately inhabit.
One of the first times this theme emerges is when the formidable Rosalind Steed sends her sons to the fictional St. Omer’s to receive a strong Catholic education, but notices an unintended consequence when they return. “They were together when the geese prepared for their long flight north, and although she was moved by their departure, the boys were not, and this frightened her. ‘You must live close to nature. Books and priests are not life. The coming and going of the crabs down there in the river…that’s life.’” A woman of action in the face of a husband who was not, Rosalind directs life at the family estate and ensures her sons take the ideas they gained during their education and ground them to the land they must nurture. As she does so, “her sons began to see their patrimony through her eyes, and to appreciate the heavy responsibility they must assume on their return from St. Omer’s.”
For a different example, the book takes us to a time when nations across the world are arguing in parliamentary buildings about the best ways to end the horrors of the slave trade. With this backdrop, a judge in Britain must deal with the case of a group of captives from Africa who commandeered the vessel they were held hostage in, with future Shore resident Cudjo as their captain. Instead of freeing the group, the judge makes the decision to send them into American slavery, a stunning decision that does not cause the outcry in Europe it should have, because “the citizenry was so preoccupied with doing good for blacks in general that it had no energy left to protect the rights of specific blacks.” A society focusing on the abstract, while important, seemed to only hurt the lives of these actual people, and in one swoop, the judge sends Cudjo and his embattled companions on their way in bondage.
We see a similar tale with young Bartley Paxmore, whose family had railed against slavery in impassioned arguments in a Quaker meeting house for centuries. Despite this heritage, Bartley has no idea how to react when an actual fugitive slave shows up at the house of his intended in-laws, the Starbucks. “At Peace Cliff, his family had been philosophically committed to exterminating slavery in general; the Starbucks were willing to risk their lives to aid an individual black man.” The best Bartley can do at the time is obey the calm, practical orders of his future father-in-law to bury the man’s old clothes in the earth where dogs chasing him can’t smell them. The incident proves life-changing not only for the man they rescue that night, but for the ones that come after him as Bartley and Rachel become a stepping stone of an underground railroad into Pennsylvania.
In a more modern example, the lure of wealth and power pulls two of the Shore’s brightest youths far from home, Owen Steed to the oil business and Pusey Paxmore to the White House. In time, both of these men become corrupted by the powerful positions they hold, and get caught up in fighting what they perceive as abstract evils of their time. For ends they tell themselves are justified, they become involved in the Watergate scandal, one by providing dirty money, and one by laundering it for the benefit of his crooked president. After realizing the extent to which they discarded generations of moral instruction, both end up returning to their ancestral homes on the bay in differing degrees of ruin and shame. In conversation together at the end of their lives, one remarks to the other, “we lads from the Eastern shore, we do poorly when we venture into the world. Much better we stay in our retreats and listen to the echos coming across the bay.” Both of them abandoned the reality of their community for a empty world, with one so far gone that he no longer reacts to the majestic flight of geese across his path.
Through these (and other) examples, James Michener illustrates repeatedly throughout Chesapeake that the terrible forces of evil across history are often too much for one person to change, but those in the book who are most effective at doing real good are the ones focused on real action with the people at hand. The Quakers in the book repeatedly emphasize the nature of faith grounded in works, of a job well done, of brave, direct action towards the good of a community.
Perhaps there is more than a little irony in sharing the conclusion to stay grounded in action via the medium of an essay written under a pen name to be read by a faceless audience. But hopefully those of us with tendency towards reading about ideas walk away from Chesapeake better focused on how to apply those ideas to action for good. Like my son and I witnessed in a delusional squirrel on the way to school one misty morning, while we sometimes battle with high-flying ideas, eventually the ground will hit us whether we’re ready for it or not. I hope that Chesapeake continues to inspire us all to find ways to get grounded in our real communities, and to take action for good while we are there.