Southern Maryland’s Calvert County is where the wife and I perch. Bordered by the Patuxent River and Chesapeake Bay, it lies just 30 miles south of D.C., but to most of my snooty Northern-Virginia-dwelling colleagues it might as well be French Lick, in sensibility if not topography.
Cosmopolites are unusually suspicious of people who sell or, worse, make things for a living, which accounts for most of my neighbors. So by now, I am used to the gibes (dispatched with the Old Dominion glibness that regards Maryland as a thick-ankled sister), as when they call my stretch of paradise “above-ground pool country.”
Aesthetically, they have a point. Most of my neighbors’ exteriors are done in the style known as Home Depot Baroque. They collect acrylic barnyard animals, plastic buck crossbow targets, chawbacon sculpture (“Kissing Dutch Children,” “Frogs ‘Neath the Umbrella”) and all sorts of windmills, weathervanes, and Tiki idols. Strung with Christmas lights (which don’t come down till February), my rural street looks like a putt-putt course in Reno.
It is against this backdrop, however, that I’ve made two of my dearest acquaintances: RC and Booty. Both are union welders who work spottily and drink heartily. Boot, as we call him (since everyone in Maryland knows at least one “Booty”) sports a conductor’s cap and has a John Lee Hooker mien with just enough teeth to get the job done. I only understand every third word he says, but I’m grateful for his vigilance. He’s our informal neighborhood watch, walking everywhere.
We don’t see RC as much. He’s around, but since he favors camouflage bib overalls, we often lose him against the foliage unless we catch a shimmer from his tipped Bud can. RC has a taste for the suds, mostly low-end domestic stuff: Bud, Busch, National Bohemian, and his favorite, “The Beast.”
“Ya’ll probably think I’m a drunk,” he apologized, handing us a bottle of his homestyled apple wine. “But I only drink when I’m out in the yard.” RC does a lot of yardwork.
He was an undefeated boxer in the Marines, and I find myself emulating his scrappy mannerisms, tossing off conversational curses and drawling that Maryland “o,” always pronounced like the one in “tow,” with the “w” dragged on like a post-coital smoke. “I used to hit the bags a lot myself,” I volunteered, hoping to impress him.
“I guess they don’t hit back much, do they?” he said expressionless. RC has a Natty Bo world-view, a nifty way of bottom-lining everything, which in my occasional regional pieces discourages me from succumbing to that let’s- squirt-a-few-for-country-folk vein that Pat Conroy mines so well whenever tiptoeing through a purple passage on the South Carolina lowlands.
RC isn’t prone to sentimentality. He’s a man who despoils nature with the ease of someone who grew up in it. “You know them birds that fly overhead every evening?” he asked, referring to a V-formation of geese. “Well, Boot and I like to sit on his deck, have a few beers, and shoot at ’em. Do you mind?” Of course I didn’t — I never judge a man who’s sozzled and holding a firearm.
RC and Boot, in turn, suspend any judgment of me — such as when I flipped my riding mower over a stump, or when I let the yard go for a month. “I must be dragging property values down,” I apologized. “Shoot, no! That’s why we moved out here, because you can do anything you want,” RC assured me, displaying his parked utility vehicles and more boats than an average family has cars. “In that case, I believe I’ll start relieving myself off the porch,” I rejoined. “Hell,” he said, not an eyelash batted, “I do it all the time.”
My assimilation isn’t total. RC’s chickens leave chocolate boluses in my dog’s dish, and the horseshoe ringers make it impossible to nap with the windows open.
But it is RC and Boot who volunteered to put the door on my shed, who borrowed my mower then cut my grass, sharpening the blades and changing the oil. When they saw me struggling with my feeble electric weed eater, they both came over unprompted with their gas-powered, jet-pack-handled, double- feeding monsters. With no protective eyewear or concern for their own safety, they morphed into 380 pounds of precision weed-whacking prowess.
So it is here I will stay, amongst the bait shops and Bingo palaces, slathering newspapers over picnic tables with a tank of Old Bay seasoning and picking crustaceans with my friends. Keep your Georgian colonials and gourmet takeout, your bike paths and microbreweries. As RC explained when he and Boot oversaw a leaf burn in my yard since they knew I was pushing a hard deadline: “You just gotta relax, come out here with us, have a few belts and cut s– up. ”
MATT LABASH
