by Bill Peak
First printed in the Star-Democrat on August 5, 2012. Our thanks to Bill and the Star-Democrat for allowing us to reprint his submission.

OK, I’ll admit it, sometimes an uncontrollable urge comes over me to put on a funny hat, grab a pair of binoculars, and go out and look for Yellow-Bellied Sapsuckers and Short-Billed Marsh Wrens.  That’s right, I’m a bird-watcher.  I’ve tried the twelve-step program, I’ve tried the patch, but so far nothing’s been found to replace the pleasure I take in looking at birds.

And it’s not just their beauty that appeals to me.  True, the sure knowledge that the trees around us hide Scarlet Tanagers and Indigo Buntings can make it hard for me to stay at my desk, but I also delight in the life histories of these animals.  I well remember, for instance, the time I watched the travails of a dove who had built her nest on an exposed limb near our deck.  After she’d laid her eggs, it turned cold and then it began to rain.  For three days and three nights the rain fell, yet that poor bedraggled creature never once abandoned her clutch.  Hobbes might label such a life (as he did ours) “nasty, brutish, and short,” but that dove taught me something about perseverance, and the simple dignity accruing to those that care without counting the cost.

And now along comes One Maryland One Book to give me another reason to think about the small lives lived so humbly all around us.  One Maryland One Book is the program of the Maryland Humanities Council in which people all across the state read the same book at the same time.  This year’s selection, The Cellist of Sarajevo tells the story of three unrelated people who find themselves trapped in the title city during the Serbian siege of 1992.  To varying degrees each is touched by the story of a fourth character, a professional cellist who, in defiance of the snipers killing civilians all around him, goes every day at the same time to the same place in plain view of the heights from which those snipers operate and plays Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor.

Author Steven Galloway has taken the true story of Bosnian cellist Vedran Smailovi? and turned it into a modern morality tale, at once both intense thriller and exquisite work of art.  The story’s drama derives in no small part from the fact that each of its characters lives with the sure knowledge that the air around them can—and very likely soon will—fill with bullets.  Death is everywhere, and they watch for it with a vigilance that makes their lives seem in some ways more alive, more acute, than our own.

• Click here to view a calendar of One Maryland One Book events, programs, and discussions in your area.

If you want to know what this look likes in real life, watch a bird-feeder.  Birds live in a world where the slightest movement—a quivering leaf, a sailing shadow—can signal doom.  Like Sarajevans at a street market, when birds gather at a feeder they must keep one eye on the sky for harriers, another on the bushes for cats, and a third on the ground for snakes.  Their lives, however small, are lived big: all senses on high alert.  Similarly, the people of Sarajevo.  I have read and enjoyed every One Maryland One Book, but The Cellist of Sarajevo is far and away the best of the lot.  Please, if you get a chance, check out one of the library’s 87 copies, read it, and then sign up for one of the book discussions I’ll be hosting in September.  I look forward to hearing what you think.

Bill Peak writes a monthly article for the Star-Democrat about working at the Talbot County Free Library. Photo:  Bill Peak getting ready to go bird watching

Contributed by author Dan Fesperman

Last year, a voice from the siege of Sarajevo called out to me. I’d last spoken to Dario Petrlic when he was almost 14 years old, a conversation punctuated by shell blasts and sniper fire in February 1994. Only a month earlier an exploding grenade had torn open his left shoulder with a spray of shrapnel.

At the time, Dario and his family – mom, dad, and two older brothers – were living practically like moles in the suburb of Dobrinja. Author Steve Galloway only mentions Dobrinja in passing in his fine novel, and I can certainly understand why. It was nearly severed from the rest of the city, and, as I wrote then, “If Sarajevo is hell on earth, Dobrinja is its innermost circle of despair.”

The daily roulette of life which Galloway describes so aptly had its lowest odds of all in Dobrinja, where sidewalks were trenches, lawns were cemeteries, and virtually every building was cordoned by sandbags. A novel set there would have been too claustrophobic for most readers to bear.

Dario’s father, Jurag, had made only one harrowing journey out of Dobrinja since the beginning of the siege – a ride inside an armored vehicle that felt “like a voyage inside a coffin” – and upon arriving at Sarajevo’s besieged city center he had felt liberated: “I thought, I am in a normal city again. The people who live there, they can walk around. They go to markets, to cafes. I envy them.”
In Dobrinja, the Petrlic family almost never went outdoors except to step onto their balcony, which by some minor miracle wasn’t vulnerable to sniper fire. Although, as Dario had discovered, it wasn’t safe from shelling. He was standing there when he was wounded by a blast which killed a man in the courtyard below and partially deafened his brother Mario.

I spent perhaps an hour with the Petrlic family, chatting at times about the way some people had simply given up and no longer took precautions after two years of siege. I filed a story and never returned to Dobrinja.
Then, in the summer of last year, Dario’s email arrived. After more than 17 years he had tracked down my story, and then me.
“Now I am 31 years old,” he wrote, “working, learning and celebrating the life whenever I can do that.”
We corresponded further.

Dario had earned a university degree, was working as a sales engineer for a multinational corporation, and had moved to Zagreb. But the best news was that everyone in his family had survived the war. They never gave up, never stopped taking precautions. In their daily struggle against “the men on the hills,” as Galloway calls them, the Petrlic family had never yielded on the most important battlefront – the one inside their heads.

“My brother Mario is Croatian military pilot and brother Tomislav has graduated from the Faculty of Economics. My parents are well – after all they can’t complain. ” – Dan Fesperman

MHC would like to thank Mr. Fesperman for sharing this contribution in celebration of this year’s One Maryland One Book selection, The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway.

Dan Fesperman is a novelist and former reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He covered the war in Bosnia while serving as the paper’s Berlin correspondent, and Sarajevo became the setting for his first novel, Lie in the Dark. His latest novel, The Double Game, was published last month by Knopf.

Contributed by Paul Mathews, Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University

During a dangerous moment of reflection on an otherwise harried day, a man named Kenan pauses to consider a musician playing the cello to the accompaniment of distant gunfire.  The cellist, who remains nameless throughout Steven Galloway’s novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, becomes the subject of much speculation and concern in the war-torn city after beginning a series of performances in the rubble of a destroyed market.

The story of Kenan is one of three parallel narratives found in Galloway’s work, which explores how several Sarajevans make sense of the musician’s performances.  Some cling to the recitals as a semblance of humanity in a world that is collapsing around them.  Others hope the daring act will capture the attention of an outside world that seems to have forsaken them.  Still others will stop at nothing to prevent a pathetic spectacle from shaming the international community into a decisive intervention.

Kenan, a veritable everyman, has far more practical concerns. Amidst shelling and sniper fire, his sole task is to travel across the ravaged city to fetch water for his family and an ungrateful neighbor.  The trip is eventful and harrowing. In a particularly transitional moment during his errand, Kenan hears the mournful strains of an adagio and asks himself, “What could the man possibly hope to accomplish by playing music in the street?”

• Click here to find a One Maryland One Book Discussion or program near you!

I remember asking myself a similar question when the Occupy Wall Street protestors took to the streets in September 2011.  Such questions are not so much a matter of inquiry as an expression of exasperation: we think we are witnessing a futile, even petulant act of protest.

In the United States, we associate protest with the large demonstrations of the 1960s, when tens of thousands of people assembled to campaign for civil rights or to protest the war in Vietnam.  The oppressive police states of the Eastern Bloc did not permit such assemblies.  Behind the Iron Curtain, an act of protest was literally an act of suicide: most notably, public self-immolation.

As a city in the former Yugoslavia, Sarajevo was not part of the Eastern Bloc.  The transaction of personal sacrifice for public reform would seem alien to Kenan, who probably only knew of such horrific acts as something they did in Prague or Warsaw during the bad times.

Yet, when similarly bad times descend on the former Yugoslavia, the armed forces fighting for the city quickly understand the potential significance of the cellist’s actions. Sarajevans risk their lives, snaking through city streets that have become shooting galleries to hear the cellist play.  Regardless of his intentions, the cellist’s performances draw attention to the savagery of the conflict.

The musician at the center of such high stakes is a comparatively minor character. Prior to the market massacre, the cellist – fictional parallel of Vedran Smailovi?, the real Cellist of Sarajevo – was simply struggling to remain a cellist. In the aftermath, without an orchestra, opera house, or other performance prospects, the virtuoso still practices every day for reasons he probably cannot even articulate. Playing the cello becomes the only thing that gives him hope.  On days when even his normal practice routine fails to restore hope, the cellist plays one particular piece, an adagio, set aside as a last resort.

The cellist’s relationship with the adagio is a familiar type of behavior, usually exhibited by people who manage unhealthy habits and obsessions. The discomfort caused by such routines becomes clear when we map the behavior to less savory pursuits:  the incipient stalker who tries to last several days before driving past the house of a former lover; the fad dieter who rewards a day of unhealthy fasting by binging on ice cream; the despairing soul that holds to only two drinks except on the days that seem too long to wait for two more drinks.

In making such analogies, I do not mean to suggest that playing music is any way unhealthy.  Given the state of Sarajevo during the siege, I doubt the cellist could have done anything more worthwhile.  And given the satisfaction of musical accomplishment, I can think of few things better for anyone on any day.  However, managing stress and satisfaction, whether in the form of addiction or musical accomplishment, is often a private matter.

By playing music in that terrible time, Galloway’s cellist is managing the intimate struggles of his daily life. By taking those struggles to the market, the cellist is simply doing the thing that artists do best: placing personal struggles on public display.

When Kenan first asks what the cellist hopes to accomplish, he certainly doesn’t have the presence of mind to think through such things.  The soldiers and politicians who imagine the cellist is staging a dramatic protest are only half-right: it is indeed a demonstration, but one more personal than political.

Nothing holds more truth for more people than the agonized epiphany of a single person.  In Galloway’s novel, exposure to the cellist’s performances fundamentally changes each of the major characters.  In real life, the performances of Vedran Smailovi? captured the attention of the world, and NATO was eventually compelled to intervene in the conflict.

Within the broad metrics introduced by Kenan’s question, the twenty-two impromptu performances in the destroyed market are quite an accomplishment.  However, in the more meaningful exchange between performer and audience, the cellist embraces the grief and horror of a crumbling Sarajevo and dares its captive citizens to join him in an adagio of the last resort: the courage of implausible hope.

Paul Mathews is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University. A composer of opera and chamber music, Mathews was born in Baltimore and attended Maryland Public Schools.  www.about.me/paulmathews

Visit the Baltimore Book Festival on Sunday, September 30 at noon to hear a Peabody Conservatory student play Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor before Cellist of Sarajevo author Steven Galloway speaks, answer questions, and sign copies of this year’s One Maryland One Book.  Steven Galloway then travels throughout Maryland. Click here to view a complete author tour schedule. 

Have you ever wondered what exactly a muskrat is? How about how Enoch Pratt came to make his invaluable contributions to Baltimore and the State of Maryland? (Bet you didn’t know he started off selling mules’ shoes!) Have you ever imagined what it would be like to live in a war torn country—whether America in 1812 or Bosnia in 1996? You’ll discover all this and much, MUCH more getting involved with the Maryland Humanities Council (MHC). For, you see, Marylanders are passionate about these, among so many other subjects.

Amelia works a sharing station during the Chesapeake Folk Festival

Working with MHC, as a summer intern, I was able to experience many of these passions first-hand. I contributed to the upcoming Literary Walking Tour app and in doing so I collaborated with citizens who lived for the city’s architecture, and those who lived in it; some who could recite Carl Sandburg from memory, while others could recite the history of the semi-colon. Whether writing, researching, or walking the city, each day was a new discovery. Although, I worked principally with the Maryland Center for the Book, my experience was not limited to my work on the tour. The Maryland Humanities Council, like the community it serves, is a tight-knit group—everyone eager to help everyone else.  Therefore, in my short time at the council I was able to jawbone with Ecuadorian sailors while volunteering at Sailabration; contemplated resurrecting John F. Kennedy as part of next year’s Chautauqua; learned about Fortune and his bones through the grants program; travelled to and from Sarajevo through this year’s One Maryland One Book, The Cellist of Sarajevo; deliberated skipjack restoration while debating ecosystem maintenance with Eastern Shore residents at a sharing station with the Let’s Be Shore program; and much more.

Amelia with a sailor during Sailabration

As my experience illustrates, working with MHC, you’ll not only encounter countless unique passions, but also help Marylanders share their interests with one another, educating their neighbors and themselves in the process. Witnessing understanding, common ground, and friendship blossom from these disparate, unique, and sometimes even zany interests is one of the most rewarding experiences you can imagine.

Passion at the Humanities Council is not limited to the Marylanders MHC serves—quite the opposite! Each and every staff member, from the executive director to the weekly volunteer, has their own passions: a passion for life, a passion for their favorite nugget of the humanities, as well as for the humanities in general, and above all– a passion for serving their community. These passions invigorate their work, electrify the MHC office, and elevate MHC programs beyond their already superb level.

Whatever your passion, you can find it, support it, and share it through the Maryland Humanities Council. Where else in the course of a day could you edit an account of young Gertrude Stein’s life in Baltimore, address a letter to a baroness, learn the history of the Beltway thanks to a Maryland History Day participant, debate dystopian literature, see the bullet that killed Lincoln and the skeletal remains of the first monkey in space, all before lunch?

Amelia T. Grabowski is a senior at Gettysburg College studying English and History. She hopes to continue working in the public humanities after she graduates.

Kaplon Building Windows Recapture Excitement: Journey Stories opens in Frederick County August 31.
By Rebecca O’Leary, Curator at the Brunswick Railroad Museum.

Brunswick is gearing up for Journey Stories in a big way. The Smithsonian exhibit is rolling into town on August 31 and will feature six weeks of exciting programming and events and will offer visitors the chance to enter an iconic Brunswick building – the site of the V. Kaplon Company, which was Brunswick’s premier department store throughout most of the Twentieth Century.

“We’re especially excited about housing Journey Stories in the Kaplon Building,” said Journey Stories committee co-chair Robin Bowers, of the Brunswick Branch of the Frederick County Public Library. “We participated in the “Stories From Main Street” Youth Access program, during which local students took oral histories from a number of longtime Brunswick residents to produce a feature length video called Brunswick, which will be part of the Journey Stories exhibit and will also be treated to a “red carpet” premiere at the Brunswick Library on October 11.

During this process, we learned that Miss Fanny Kaplon made a yearly trip to New York every November to check out the Christmas displays at stores like Bergdorf Goodman, Saks, and Macy’s. She would return to Brunswick, cover the display windows with paper, and begin preparing the Kaplon Store’s display windows. People in Brunswick anticipated the moment when the paper would come down and the window displays would be revealed for days, and would gather on the streets for the big moment. We’re going to try to recapture that moment by covering the windows in mid-August and then loading in window displays celebrating local traditions and hot spots such as Brunswick’s baseball heritage, our railroad connections, and iconic local businesses such as the Imperial Theatre and the V. Kaplon Co. These window displays will feature artifacts from the Brunswick Railroad Museum and on loan from local citizens. The windows will be revealed at 10am on August 31st during a ribbon cutting ceremony.

In addition to the window displays, the Journey Stories committee has also created an interactive exhibit focusing on the popularity of mail order catalogs like Sears and Roebuck in railroad communities like Brunswick. “Mail order was huge around here,” said Journey Stories committee co-chair Rebecca O’Leary. “People ordered everything from musical instruments to sewing machines to houses.” Visitors will be able to see examples of typical mail order items and will learn more about the area’s Sears and Roebuck homes.

The action isn’t just limited to the Kaplon Building. Journey Stories events will be taking place all over the City of Brunswick. A full day of opening celebration events on August 31st include a Brunswick Stew cook-off contest in downtown Brunswick, displays of Native American hoop dancing, Irish dancing, and raks sharqi, and a special kickoff concert made possible by the Community Foundation of Frederick County featuring GRAMMY nominated performer Ray Owen in Brunswick’s Square Corner Park. Other events included living history demonstrations, festivals, and a gala celebrating the mid-century glory days of the Hawaiian Nightclub (a favorite haunt of Patsy Cline’s!), featuring the Star-Spangled Big Band and the Hub City Lindy Hoppers, courtesy of the Harry George Family Trust. Finally, Journey Stories will end on a high note with Project Run-a-Way, a dynamic living history performance based on the experiences of runaway slaves presented by the Historic Annapolis Foundation and made possible by the Tourism Council of Frederick County.

Journey Stories Brunswick offers something for everyone! Check us out at www.journeystoriesbrunswick.org.

This post was contributed by Rebecca O’Leary, Curator at the Brunswick Railroad Museum, and provides an overview of programs and events which tell Frederick County’s Journey Story. MHC is thrilled to bring the Museum on Main Street program to great cultural institutions across the state.

Throughout the year, MHC will re-post from our blog on www.letsbeshore.org.  This post, from June 9, was contributed by Kate Livie of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.  Click here to read or subscribe to Let’s Be Shore blog posts.

Bay Heritage, Family Legacy, by Katie Livie

“Tell me some words that described the Chesapeake Bay,” I say to the group of students clustered in an Indian-style semi-circle at my feet. They wave their hands, eager to respond, and as I point to each in turn, they share their one-word assessments:

“Brown.”
“Brackish.”
“Polluted.”
“Sick.”
“Dirty.”
“Crabs!”

As I listen to these kids describe the Chesapeake they’re familiar with, I remember opening my eyes underwater in the Chester River as a child, like them. The water swirled with eddies of sediment, and my hands, parting the current before me, looked as pallid as the underbelly of a perch. Emerging from the waterside, my sister and I would look at each other and laugh: silt mustaches, like the remnants of a glass of chocolate milk, would cling to our upper lips as a thick particulate ring.  I wouldn’t have described the Chesapeake I knew then as dirty, even though it was, or polluted. I would have said, “swimming,” or “crabbing,” or “fun.”  All of my associations with the Bay came from first-hand experiences, and most of them were magical: swimming at Cacaway Island, waiting with a dipnet for a dangling jimmy to emerge on a slow trotline, screaming into the wind as the Whaler plowed through rolling wake at the turn on Devil’s Reach.  Listening to my students at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, Maryland,  I’m struck by two things: how far away most kids today are from the intimate and wonderful relationship I enjoyed with the Chesapeake as a child, and the inevitable question: will my grandchildren know even a shadow of the Bay I love?

I know I’m a rarity around here these days––a professional young adult committed to making the Eastern Shore my permanent home. So many of us from the next generation have moved away to follow jobs and the promise of opportunity, but a number of young folk have listened to the siren call of our roots and come back to settle in our hometowns. It’s a compromise, of course. You give up big concerts and ethnic food and the promise of a plethora of well-paying professional opportunities for the languid summer days, familiar faces and crooked brick sidewalks of home.

There is never a day that I doubt my decision–it just feels right. Watching an ombre sunset of oranges and pinks over the salt meadows at Eastern Neck Island, I know continuing my family’s legacy along the Chester and deepening my roots was an inevitability rather than a choice. But accepting my place in the line of six generations of Bay residents comes with responsibility as well as rewards. At this watershed point in history (all puns intended), how will we Chesapeake people shape the future of the Eastern Shore we love so well?

As the director of education at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, this thought is a constant thread through the weft of my professional as well as personal life.  Just as our lives along the Bay’s edges are defined by the constant presence of the Bay and its tributaries, so too is the Chesapeake Bay increasingly defined by the people living in its watershed.  Our population swells with each successive decade in the area surrounding the Bay, and in response, the quality of the water, and abundance of wildlife, and the lush acreage of marsh meadow both above and below the waterline attenuate accordingly.

When you live on the Eastern Shore, the signs are hard to ignore because they’re everywhere. If we haven’t yet reached the tipping point from which we can never return, we soon will. Every summer, the dead zones, fed by a thick blanket of human, animal, and chemical waste, stretch their suffocating boundaries farther– and the fish they kill float tumescently on the water when I run my dogs out at Sassafras. The oyster population, once one of the Bay’s keystone animals, hovers at one percent of its original number– and the native oysters we shuck at Thanksgiving are thick and furrowed with MSX and Dermo.  Even watermen, in my childhood as natural and expected a part of the Bay landscape as the blue heron, have been forced away from the coves and creeks where they once made their daily bread. Nowadays, just a few communities struggle on, and people come to museums like mine to see the tools and traditions that watermen developed in response to the thriving ribbons of life that used to pulse through the estuary.

But in spite of everything, and even if the words my students use to describe the Bay they know are accurate, it isn’t too late for us to change. It isn’t past the point where we can all agree that maybe we’re going about this the wrong way. There needs to be a balance between what is sustainable for us as humans, and what is sustainable for the Chesapeake’s environment. Ideally the balance would weigh both goals, human and environmental, as equally important. It’s an approach that makes sense, especially when you consider how irrevocably entangled we are now, and have always been, with our landscape in the Bay.

I believe the first step towards finding that harmonious balance is to foster that old Bay magic I know so well from my childhood as a semi-aquatic creature.  It’s not really about turning off light bulbs, or recycling, or making sure that your toilet saves water, despite what all those ‘Save the Bay’ campaigns have told you. That can come later. The first step toward Chesapeake stewardship is first and foremost about feeling a passionate sense of respect and regard for this Eastern Shore place where we’ve been so lucky to settle. By awakening engagement in the people that live in the watershed, and encouraging the feeling in individuals that the Bay is just a little bit theirs alone to treasure, we can encourage stewardship. Those opportunities to spark a connection with the land and water are easy enough to find, too: they’re present in every osprey whistle, every snapping turtle laying eggs in your driveway, and every snap of the crab’s claws as it hides under your picnic table to avoid the cookpot.  Because its those moments that make this Eastern Shore place worth saving: for our kids and for ourselves.

Kate Livie at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum

Kate Livie is a Chestertown resident who is also the director of education at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, where she has worked in various capacities since 2008.

Join MHC at the Chesapeake Folk Festival in  St. Michael’s on July 28. While you are there, stop by the Let’s Be Shore sharing station or attend the free Let’s Be Shore panel discussion at 3pm.

“How did you end up in Cecil County?” It’s my favorite question to ask. Whether you’re a “from here” or a “come here,” there’s always a story to answer that question.

My journey to Cecil County was many years in the making, having grown up a Navy-brat moving from Coast to Coast, I attended college in upstate New York and started my career in New York City. The Cecil County landscape reminds my husband of summers at his grandmother’s Long Island farm, before everything was developed and crowded, and so, for a reason as simple as that, we settled here.

American history is filled with tales of immigration and migration and rags to riches mobility. Americans have always been on the move. Early settlers on horseback searched for better farmland, religious freedom or gold. The industrial revolution spurred innovations in agriculture, manufacturing and transportation, which grew our nation. From steam engine trains to automobiles and airplanes, transportation is an integral part of our social and economic landscape.
This summer, Cecil County Public Library is delighted to partner with the Cecil County Arts Council and the Historical Society of Cecil County to bring you the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street exhibit “Journey Stories.” Cecil County is one of only five sites in Maryland to host this special program and there are events planned county-wide this summer and into the fall. Be on the look-out for a full calendar coming soon.

Elkton Main Street on its 100th anniversary. Photo: Cecil County Historical Society

The Smithsonian exhibit will focus on themes of transportation and immigration on a national scale and library events will focus on local stories. Ukrainian immigrants settled in Chesapeake City to build the C&D Canal and the rivers were busy with barges of tobacco. Lovers flocked to Elkton during the heydays of the marriage business and World War II brought droves of soldiers and munitions workers to the county. A doctor arrived from Russia in the early 1950s with his family, and a local boy who integrated at Elkton High school went on to an internationally successful music career. These are the stories of Cecil County.
What is your Journey Story? Where did your family start their journey? Where did they settle down? Share by leaving a comment below!

This post was contributed by Frazier Walker, Cecil County Public Library

During the course of the Let’s Be Shore project, MHC wants to share posts contributed to our blog on www.letsbeshore.org.  Thank you to Dr. Bell, for his guest post.  We welcome your comments and encourage you to watch a video and leave your response.

It is an honor and a challenge to open the blog for MHC’s “Let’s Be Shore” Project. As former Director of the Washington College Center for Environment and Society, I developed a Rural Communities Leadership program that included new courses, guest speakers, and public forums all centered on sustainable development of Eastern Shore communities. The safety of academia allowed us to examine issues involving environment, land use, sense of place, and local economics from a wide variety of different and often divisive perspectives. Our findings met the real world as students, citizen and faculty colleagues, and I developed what became a Vision Plan for Sustaining Agriculture in Talbot County, Maryland. It took over a year to complete, but after many constructive revisions the plan was endorsed by both the Talbot County Farm Bureau and the County Council at the end of 2007.

What lessons were learned over the seven years that I was deeply involved in sustainable community development? First and foremost is the power of constructive dialogue. This is fairly easy to achieve within the walls of a classroom where issues can be debated without having to implement the outcome. It is far more difficult in a public meeting where opinions are strongly held and personal livelihoods are at stake. Let’s Be Shore is making maximum use of advances in technology to provide opportunity for public discourse and exchange. Trust and civility must be strengths, not casualties, of such opportunity.

My second lesson involves information. Despite the extraordinary source of knowledge that the Internet has become, it seems to me that people involved in controversial issues actually are less informed about perspectives different from theirs. We hide our ignorance by using blanket words and concepts: Chesapeake Bay is “polluted;” “big agriculture” is a “problem;” keep the Shore “rural.” What do these really mean, and how are they interrelated?

My third and final lesson is the importance of leadership. Civil dialogue based on shared information is necessary but insufficient if there is no leader to serve as translator and catalyst. The problems you are addressing are ongoing and solutions to them will be as well. Ultimate success will depend less on creating a favorable outcome to a given controversy and more on sustaining that outcome. An initiative should not end when its current leader moves on.

One important concept that emerged from our various activities is “working landscape” — land use that is economically significant for those who depend on it and environmentally sustainable for those who enjoy it. Public forums held under the Talbot County visioning project revealed that citizens value agriculture most as a contributor to Eastern Shore quality of life and the scenic beauty its open spaces provide. Economic return appears to be secondary to many — but not to the farmer! If agriculture were not profitable, would quality of life be the same? Most of the land on Eastern Shore watersheds is over 80% agricultural, the great majority raising grain sold locally to the poultry industry. Conversion to small farms for niche markets sounds appealing, but where are those markets? How many such farms can the shore support? And what happens to the remaining lands if grain is no longer a viable economic option? Ross Hanson, while chair of MD Environmental Trust in 2002, defined a working landscape as “. . . one that maintains and works to enhance the responsibility of private land owners, individually, to improve the land for successive generations of those who work it and, collectively, to pass on to each new generation a landscape that is a greater environmental asset than they received. Moreover, a working landscape is an irreplaceable cultural resource.” In your search to reconcile issues of land use, agriculture, economy, and water quality, remember to help us all keep the Eastern Shore truly working.

I wish you the very best as you embark on “Let’s Be Shore.”

Wayne Bell, Ph.D. is a Senior Associate at the Center for Environment and Society at Washington College. He holds a B.S. from the University of Miami (FL), 1967; A.M. from Harvard University, 1969; and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, 1976.

We hope you enjoyed our recently posted Q&A with Alan Gephardt (who portrays Francis Scott Key).  Chautauqua, MHC’s popular free living history performance series begins July 5 at Garrett College! Michele Baylin, MHC’s Communications Manager, also spoke with Mary Ann Jung, who will portray Rosalie Stier Calvert at the McHenry, Elkton, Easton, and La Plata locations. 

• View Ms Jung in a sneak peek of her performance as Rosalie Stier Calvert on MHC’s YouTube channel.
• Click here to view and print a 2012 Chautauqua Schedule. 

(MB) How long have you been appearing as Rosalie Stier Calvert? What drew you to her?

(MAJ) I wrote the Rosalie show in 1998 after reading “Mistress of Riversdale” by Margaret Law Callcott. Her letters home to her family in Belgium were so captivating and full of derails on life on a Maryland plantation in the early 1800′s I knew she’d be a perfect window into the War of 1812. I love that she’s an arrogant aristocrat who hated Thomas Jefferson, and Dolley Madison. It makes her very human and teaches people that historical characters didn’t all get along. Students are especially shocked when I say I hate Jefferson and I love it when they gasp! I want to bring history alive and this is one fun way to do it-by showing strong emotions.

(MB) How do you prepare for a living history performance?  What (if any) is the biggest misconception the public has about your character?

(MAJ) It takes me 6 months to a year to research my character, write a script, find the right costumes and props and then memorize. Daily prep means putting on the right costume, hairdo, accent, and attitude for the show.

The biggest misconception about Rosalie is that because she was wealthy she was a lady of leisure-far from it! She had 2 big plantations to run, her own Riversdale and her husband’s, Mt Albion. That meant supervising in total over a hundred servants and slaves while raising and teaching her own, large family of nine children.

(MB) Is there another historical figure whom you’d like to portray?

(MAJ) Only about a million fascinating women! But I have to choose on what audiences will want to see. I also pick people who aren’t from periods I’ve already covered. I want to do a female scientist next like Rachel Carson or Marie Curie since the emphasis in schools is on science now.

(MB) There is a Q&A which follows your performance. What’s the most interesting question (or oddest) you’ve been asked about Rosalie Stier Calvert?  Is there a question you’ve always expected but never been asked? How do you feel about this component?

(MAJ) The most interesting is “Did she know about her husband’s slave mistress Eleanor Beckett and family?” She never mentions them in her letters but I don’t see how she couldn’t have known.

I can’t think of a question I haven’t gotten-I’m pretty thorough in the show! Q & A can be as much fun and a surprising as the show itself. My 33 years of improv performing starting at the MD Renaissance Festival and then in my own shows over 25 years come in handy in both!

Mary Ann Jung as Rosalie Stier Calvert

Mary Ann Jung (Rosalie Stier Calvert) is the award-winning actress behind History Alive! Interactive shows. She has been a lead actress and Director of Renaissance History and Shakespearean Language at the Maryland Renaissance Festival for over thirty years. She is a Smithsonian scholar/performer and has appeared on CNN, the Today Show, and Good Morning America. Jung’s living history performances include Julia Child, Clara Barton, Mistress Margaret Brent, Rosalie of Riversdale, Amelia Earhart, Good Queen Bess, and Rosie the Riveter. She has a B.A. in British History from the University of Maryland.

The countdown to Chautauqua 2012 has begun, with only a month until MHC’s popular free living history performance series begins at its first location at Garrett College!  Michele Baylin, MHC’s Communications Manager, spoke with Alan Gephardt, who will portray Francis Scott Key at the Elkton, Easton, and Germantown locations.  We hope it provides some insight to audience members prior to Chautauqua performances.

Click here to view and print a 2012 Chautauqua Schedule.  We’d love to read your comments about your experiences as an audience member who has attended a Chautauqua performance. What historical characters did you find the most engaging, enlightening, or unexpected?

(MB) How long have you been appearing as Francis Scott Key? What drew you to him?

(AG) I have been interpreting Mr. Key since 1988 or 1989. It was quite serendipitous that I came to do this. I was raised in Edgemere, in the North Point community where the Todd’s Inheritance is. One summer day in 1989 I was riding my bike near Todd’s, when the then-owner, Elmer Cook, a high school teacher whom I knew, waved me over and told me about a historical festival to be held at Fort Howard in September. In high school, I had been very active in theatre and acting. He asked me if I would be interested in doing a five minute talk as Key at the event. I agreed to do it, and the rest is history, after a fashion!

(MB) How do you prepare for a living history performance?

(AG) To prepare, I read and reread the information I have acquired about him. I always recite the four verses of the poem before I perform because I usually finish with them. There have been a few times when I have suddenly blanked, and so I always try to remember to recite.
(MB) What (if any) is the biggest misconception the public has about Francis Scott Key?

(AG) The biggest misconception about Key is that he was called “Francis,” or “Sir Francis.” People seem to forget that he was an American, not a Brit, and therefore would not have been a knighted person. He was not called “Francis” by close friends and family. He was called “Frank.” Of course, in his day, strangers would have addressed him as “Mr. Key.” People will speak to me/him familiarly, and it bothers me. We are so casual today that we are on an immediate first-name basis. In his time that was not the case, and so when I am portraying him I can only imagine how put off he would be to be addressed by his first name by perfect strangers!

(MB) Is there another historical figure that you’d like to portray?

No, at the moment there is no one else I wish to portray. If I could portray an American President that would be fun, but I don’t resemble any of them, so…

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Alan Gephardt has worked in the public history field for over twenty years and is currently a Park Ranger for the National Park Service, splitting his time between Hampton National Historic Site and Fort McHenry in Baltimore, and James A. Garfield National Historic Site outside Cleveland.  He earned his Bachelor’s degree in history at Towson University and his Masters at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Mr. Gephardt will join four other actor/scholars as he portrays Francis Scott Key at the Maryland Humanities Council’s Chautauqua 2012:  Maryland and the War of 1812, running July 5-13 at six locations in Maryland.

Watch a documentary about Francis Scott Key, with Mr. Gephardt voice as Key:

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UBi2d5fb5M4#!