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The New Bay Boaters

by Meg Walburn Viviano

Welcome to the CBM boat issue! If you’re reading this, I can already tell there’s something about getting out on the Bay (and all its creeks and rivers) that captivates you. I’m betting you fall roughly into one of three categories when it comes to boating: 1. Those who haven’t spent much time on boats. To these folks, the pastime seems alluring, exciting, aspirational.

Maybe they’ve been invited out on a friend’s boat for the afternoon, were impressed by the nautical know-how the captain casually tosses around, and later seduced by a stunning orange sunset over an uninterrupted horizon line. 2. Boat owners. To them, boats are a labor of love, a lifestyle for which you sacrifice time and money, but wear it all like a badge of honor. That sunset cruise? Yes, it’s beautiful, and it was earned with three hours of deckscrubbing in the hot sun. Oh, and the cushions, life jackets, and cooler didn’t walk themselves down the dock, either. But doesn’t all that work make the sunset even prettier? 3. New adopters. These are the people who just bought a boat, or those who have been talking about it for years and are ready to finally make their big purchase. They have all the starry-eyed dreams of the aspirational boater from Category

One, but they’re going to have to get comfy with Category Two.

In the past 18 months, boating’s “new adopters” have multiplied. And the people who are now getting into it are not your father’s boatowner. They’re young couples, families with little kids, and more than even before, women. We meet some of these new faces throughout this special October boat issue.

It’s no surprise to us that the lifestyle is catching on. Any boater (aspirational, old, or new) will speak with reverence of the moment when dolphins surfed alongside their boat in Eastern Bay, or they were dwarfed by a massive container ship steaming toward the Port of Baltimore. It’s that once-in-alifetime fish, or the breeze against your sun-kissed face after a day of tubing and swimming off the boat, that makes boating feel like a club you were lucky enough to join. Boaters still wave to each other on a close pass, as if to say, “Hey, we’re both in on this secret.”

This season, the CBM team has been lucky to get out on the water as a group on a couple of blissful Fridays. In our media company you’ll find all three categories of Bay boaters: the eager office manager who wants to learn all there is to know about boating; the publisher, a lifelong boater that still gets giddy when sharing trivia about the Bay; and the editorial director (that’s me) who takes the helm and is filled with the pride of operating a vessel on this vast brackish expanse (and even docking it!).

Whether you’re relatively green with a new water toy or a salty longtime captain, there’s magic to find in a boat on the Bay.

Meg Walburn Viviano grew up boating on the Magothy River. She started as a Chesapeake Bay Magazine intern, launched the Bay Bulletin online news site in 2017, and now leads all of CBM’s media content. Reach her at meg@chesapeakebaymagazine.com.

TALK OF THE BAY

The Rest of the Story

How a bookseller fell in love with Chestertown

by Rafael Alvarez

If Tom Martin were to write his memoirs, the story of his life would be at home on any number of shelves at The Bookplate, the shop he has owned in Chestertown, Md. since 2004. You might find it among tomes on international peace campaigns, not far from accounts by Jimmy Carter, or in the Chesapeake Bay collection, side by side with works by Eastern Shore author Tom Horton.

And if the story, which turns on a fortuitous passage featuring hairdressers, were released during the current chapter of Martin’s 71 years,

Emily Kalwaitis, bookshop manager at The Bookplate in Chestertown, Md.

you’d find it among accounts of passionate bookstore owners, from Sylvia Beach in Paris to Larry McMurtry in Archer City, Texas. There’s even a casual acquaintance with the legendary cartoonist R. Crumb—of Keep on Truckin’ fame—whose sister, Carol Veronica Degennaro, lived in nearby Rock Hall until her death in May 2020.

Though Martin says it’s unlikely that he’ll commit the life of Detroit-born Thomas David Martin on paper anytime soon (if ever), it might be his next unexpected move when he decides to walk out of The Bookplate for the last time.

He’s made unexpected moves before. Take that one day some two decades ago when he made a sharp break with politics and the advocating of important-though-quixotic causes, like persuading the nations of the world to stop killing each other.

“I’d been traveling around the

world for 20 years—Central America and Palestine, and drinking too much,” said Martin of the moment in his mid-50s. “I had to sit down and analyze where I was in my life.”

On a trip to the now-defunct chain bookstore Borders, a sign caught his eye: Bookseller Wanted. Remembered Martin, “I thought, ‘Screw it, I need a change.” And he took the job.

“It was meant as a lark,” he said. As so often happens, the lark became his life.

After a spell with Borders, he went to work for Olsson’s Books and Records in Georgetown, which closed in 2002. The shuttering of brick-and-mortar bookstores, both national chains and independent shops, has continued apace for decades. Yet, two years after Olsson’s closed (and with the same “what the hell” attitude with which he’d made previous pivots), Martin founded The Bookplate at 112 South Cross Street in Chestertown.

But first, the hairdressers.

“The people who did my wife’s hair in D.C. had a place in Chestertown and they said, ‘You’ve got to come to Chestertown.’ We didn’t know where it was but went anyway. They had another salon across the street from a building they owned that was vacant and said, ‘Why don’t you open a bookstore?’”

Again, why not? But first Martin had some serious crabbing to do, with a guy named Dave who he’d met at a regular gathering of folks who once drank like fish and decided a more responsible life was in everyone’s best interest.

“He didn’t have anybody to work on his boat that summer and I said, ‘What about me?’” said Martin. The waterman laughed it off—are you kidding me?—but when he couldn’t find anyone else to take the job, the aspiring bookmonger came aboard.

“I’d work the crab boat from 4 a.m. to 11 a.m. and then come in here and build shelves the rest of the day,” said Martin, who can be seen baiting crab pots on the vessel in a Marc Castelli watercolor behind the store’s counter.

Castelli is an Eastern Shore institution and his scenes of life on the water there are treasured, as he is, said a fellow artist on the shore, “trusted by the people he paints because he gets to know the watermen.”

But a Castelli is not a Crumb, a distinction even the store’s black cat Keke (or a very stoned Fritz the Cat) knows.

“It’s a real treat when a cultural icon you’ve grown up with visits your store every time he’s in town,” said Martin, though since the death of Crumb’s sister it’s unlikely the longtime resident of Sauve, France will be stopping by again.

Between the watercolor of Martin the crabber’s apprentice and the customer side of the register, you will find Emily Kalwaitis—native of the Garden State, a high school library page once upon a time and, for the past seven years, store manager of The Bookplate and its 11,000 volumes.

“We’re pretty well known for our local collection,” said Kalwaitis. “Many of our customers are visitors to the area passing through. They’re enraptured

Local interest Chesapeake books share space with a wide variety of subjects.