The Glory of the Snow Cone: Helen Chappell

About the Cover Photographer Donna Tolbert-Anderson

I was so excited when Anne Farwell asked to use one of my images on the August cover so I could ditch my boring bio. I don’t like writing about myself or being in front of the camera, so I would like to take this opportunity to offer my personal congratulations to Tidewater Times for 70 years of publishing. This is now my 15th cover shot for this great little magazine, with my first cover being in June 2008 of a Sanderling. Anne Farwell and Dave Pulzone were simply top-notch people to work with. I appreciate the confidence they had in my images, and I am humbled and flattered. I always made sure my parents got a copy of the Tidewater Times. My father had a boat and he couldn’t wait to read the tide tables even though he lived in lower-slower Delaware. He liked Helen’s stories because we grew up in West Grove and he knew her father. Even now, I send Helen’s stories to my friend in Pennsylvania.

I’ve always felt that to be a serious wildlife photographer you have to be a little crazy, and I am no exception. I have been sharing the natural world for over fourteen years at the Saturday Easton Farmers Market and I always have a stack of Tidewater Times on my table. My artwork can be purchased directly from me at the Saturday market or through my website, whiteegretstudio.com.

Thank you Anne and Dave for inviting me along for the ride, and I wish Tidewater Times many more years of success.

Tom's Cove Chincoteague 11

The Glory of the Snow Cone

by Helen Chappell

There was a time, not too long in the past, when there was a lady in St. Michaels who would put a sign outside her door every summer picturing a snow cone. No writing, just a snow cone. That was all that was needed.

You would knock on her door and she would let you come on her porch, where she had a crushed ice machine and an entire array of sweet syrups, the colors of jewels lined up in the sun.

For a nominal amount, you could pick a fl avor and she would fi ll a paper cone with ice, then squirt the fl avored syrup of your choice on top.

This sweet, sugary, deeply fl avored treat was your snow cone, a blessed treat on a hot summer day when you could cut the humidity with a knife. Which would be almost any summer day on the Shore. Where breathing the humidity was like inhaling raspberry Jell-O. Raspberry is also a popular fl avor, by the way.

Snow cones, or snow ice or snowballs or whatever name they go by where you came from in Maryland, were and are part of everyone’s summer life. Right up there with steamed crabs, Old Bay and Natty Boh. They’re downright patriotic in the Old Line State.

In my journalist days, when I’d drive up from a full day of covering the Tilghman waterfront, I’d always stop and get me a snow cone. I liked lime, which tasted about as much as the fruit for which it was named as nothing.

Snow cone syrups are thick and deeply, sugary sweet, so cloying you can feel the cavities forming, and

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come in flavors that have never been outside the lab in which they were created. Your average lime-flavored snowball is as close to citrus as I am to being Queen Marie of Romania, but I tell you, in spite of all the sugar and chemicals ~ or maybe because of them ~ it is deeply, deeply satisfying, especially after a rough day of playing Margaret Mead to the watermen of Tilghman, such as they were back in those days.

Not that they were mean to me, most of the time, or unfriendly. It’s just that leaning into the bed of someone’s pickup truck down at Dogwood Cove, intently listening to other people talk about places and persons you know nothing about but are trying hard to learn, is exhausting. Fun, but exhausting. But a snow cone just melted on my tongue, and all that sweet, choppy flavor chilled down my insides, kind of cleaning out the hard work of collecting information for a story. And it still does, from time to time.

So looking back, years later, that snow cone stop was both a quencher and a way of censing my mental palate. I am also addicted to sweet green fl avors over cracked ice. It’s not that I don’t like ice cream, gelato or soft ice cream, because I do. There’s just something special about the crunch of ice in your mouth and the delicious shock of some faux fl avor on your taste buds that means when you’ve got that craving, nothing else will do.

Recently, I mentioned snow cones on a Facebook page dedicated to local topics, and the response was so big it surprised me. Snow cones are still a popular topic, and that lady in St. Michaels is fondly remembered for her special brand by a large population. No one could recall her name, but she was near Big Al’s and her husband, they said, made crab pots.

Like many other wonderful things, she seems to be gone now, but I hope wherever she is, she knows how many people appreci-

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ated her and her snow cones, and how much she’s missed in a world that’s too full of slick commercialism, franchises and people who wouldn’t understand the charm of a snow cone if they were a soul in hell and that snow cone was ice water.

Other people recalled other snow cone stands in other places: Denton, Chestertown, Cambridge, Ocean City. And everyone seemed to have wonderful memories of them. Some people were able to suggest places you could still get a snow cone. A local truck will be off ering snowballs at both the St. Michaels and Easton pools, and I’m sure there are other places where you can sample such exotic fl avors as Dubonnet and Spearmint and Sriracha. If you can dream it, someone will make a fl avored syrup of it.

All the great comfort foods come wrapped in memories and guilty pleasures. The snow cone is one of the best of summer. It eases heat, satisfi es thirst and freezes the brain.

Helen Chappell is the creator of the Sam and Hollis mystery series and the Oysterback stories, as well as The Chesapeake Book of the Dead. Under her pen names, Rebecca Baldwin and Caroline Brooks, she has published a number of historical novels.

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