Weather or Not: Helen Chappell

Celebrating 70 Years!

Tidewater Times magazine has been around for as long as I can remember. I am also 70 years old! Growing up on the Miles River near St. Michaels, there were always magazines on the coff ee table in our living room, including Life magazine, Time magazine and always, an up-to-date issue of Tidewater Times magazine. My grandfather, W. Edwin Crouch, was a real estate broker in the 1950s and ’60s. He often advertised his listings in Tidewater Times. Beginning in January 1994, when I became the broker for Sharp, Critchlow, Nash and Crouch (now associate broker with Benson and Mangold Real Estate), I began advertising and promoting my listings in Tidewater Times. I have featured “Fine Talbot County Properties” on the inside front cover page every month since...374 consecutive months! I can attribute many sales (and listings) over the past 27 years to TWT readers who called to inquire about my listings.

One of my favorite examples: I received a call from a couple early one morning last November. They told me they were having breakfast at The Tidewater Inn in Easton, had picked up a copy of Tidewater Times and saw a waterfront estate listing I had featured in the issue. They asked if was possible for me to show them the property in one hour! I knew the owners were away, so I gave them directions and said, “Yes, I will meet you at the end of the driveway.” They immediately fell in love with the property and made a $4 million cash off er. It settled 30 days later! I intend to continue advertising and promoting our listings in Tidewater Times indefi nitely.

My father used to joke that he enjoyed Playboy magazine because “It has interesting pictures, but mostly because it has great articles.” I don’t think he ever knew that my two brothers and I knew where he hid the magazines under the nightstand in his bedroom. Tidewater Times consistently has great articles and interesting photos, too, although the photos are of a diff erent genre and not as provocative! I think Tidewater Times’ success can be attributed to several factors...It is a compact publication that will easily fi t in a coat pocket or purse; the front cover photos are consistently outstanding; boaters, especially, rely on the tide tables (always on page 43); and the articles! I especially enjoy reading the local history articles by James Dawson and A. M. Foley; “Tidewater Gardening” articles by K. Marc Teff eau and many other interesting articles and stories by several very good authors. The real estate ads are good authors. The real estate ads are interesting, too!

~ Tom Crouch Benson and Mangold Real Estate

Weather or Not

by Helen Chappell

As I write this, we’re having our first snow day of the season, and it’s as thick and wet as a professional politician’s mind. Except for the snowplows and essential workers, everything has ground to a standstill, which is fine with me. I’m old enough and cowardly enough to shift a few appointments around rather than have a heart attack digging myself out.

But it does remind me of a snowstorm, or rather a series of snowstorms we had a few years ago. A foot here, three feet there, maybe eighteen inches after that. Like an unpleasant chore, it just kept rolling on. And on. And on. I think we ended up with a total of five feet, or maybe it just felt that way.

There was so much snow falling so fast I couldn’t see the houses next door or across the street. The snowplow kept coming through, getting stuck, backing out and coming back again. I don’t know how the fire department and emergency services and essential per-

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sonnel got though, but somehow they did as the rest of us cowered at home.

Anyone who’s lived on the Eastern Shore for any period of time knows the power goes in and out around here like a firefly in heat (even though the power companies do their best, let’s be fair). So, we were lucky the lights stayed on and the heat didn’t conk out and there was hot water and communication with the outside world. But we were buried in like hibernating animals.

My neighbor and I shoveled out our cars and the driveway. I was so proud of myself for actually having the stamina to move all those giant loads of snow. We somehow cleaned off our cars and dug ourselves a narrow trench through the shared driveway that would get us in and out.

Snow! Everywhere, snow covered everything, rendering the world practically invisible beneath a coat of white. It was piled so high

I couldn’t see the sides of the garage for the roof.

Every time we’d clear the drive where the snowplow had kicked up a load of rocks and ice, they’d come back and close it up again. And we’d start the process yet another time.

Massive amounts of ice chunks gathered on either side of the driveway.

As I recall, everything around here in the Mid-Atlantic ground to a halt. Days after the giant ice dump, people were still pushing massive amounts of iceberg-sized chunks from place to place. Cars were literally buried beneath snow. Out on the farm, livestock had to be fed by aircraft dropping bales of feed into the fields. People, being people, panicked. As usual, toilet paper, milk and bread flew off the shelves early on. My neighbor girded his loins, revved up his truck and headed into town to the nearest grocery store. He’d asked me for a shopping list, and I said chicken, for some reason, because I was pretty well stocked.

Rob came back with frozen Cornish game hen, all that was left of the feather meat at the Acme. I took it and said thank you, because I wasn’t going to get into my Toyota Corolla and slide all over the black ice.

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Yes, it had finally stopped snowing, but the high daytime temperatures and the freezing nights had coated every back road and a few major highways with black ice, the invisible killer.

I went to college in New Hampshire. I had experience driving on ice and snow, and believe me, now that I don’t have to, I don’t do it anymore. But when Rob told me about Mount Slushmore, I knew I had to get in the car and drive to the Acme parking lot because this was a once in a lifetime sight, and I wanted to be there for it.

I’m sure some readers will recall Mount Slushmore. It was one of those things you don’t forget. And if you missed it, well, what with climate change and everything, we may never get a repeat performance.

Somehow or another, through days of snow, melt, freeze, snow and slush, the snowplowers in the parking lot had managed, no doubt through both professionalism and luck and, I have no doubt, a really great sense of humor, managed to construct a snow pile about fifteen to twenty feet high. It was based around a light pole and was triangular in shape, like an evil Christmas tree. Anything that even looked like white was long gone. It was a glorious monument of grit, asphalt, slush, road debris and God only knows what.

In short, which it was not, it was deliciously awful, a perfect tribute

Happy 70th!

Congratulations Tidewater Times on 70 Fabulous Years!

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Weather or Not ingly ugly and dirty and nasty. It started growing stuff, like discarded food wrappers and beer cans. Cheap beer. The little rivulets of water melted slowly, slowly, but Mount Slushmore never seemed to diminish. It just sat there, dirty and brooding. I’d maybe go past it every week or fortnight and it would still be there. We started to take bets on when it would finally disintegrate. It became a kind of landmark. Crocuses were blooming, the movies had run through about fifty films, people started shedding their winter coats and Mount Slushmore remained impervious to an unwelcome and overdone as a monument. Irises came and snowstorm that had done very lit- went and the fruit trees started to tle good and a lot of harm. It was blossom, oyster season closed and a giant among snow piles and so crabbing season opened. People monstrously ugly you just had to were born and people died and stare at it. Mount Slushmore endured.

Eventually, the weather started Then, one day, maybe in May or to warm up, and Mount Slushmore June, I drove down Marlboro Avdribbled a little creeklet of polluted enue and Mount Slushmore was water down the asphalt. Not a lot, gone. Just disappeared overnight, mind you. not even leaving so much as a pud-

Like the guest who wouldn’t dle. leave, it stood there, day after It’s still a mystery to me. day, week after week, month after month. Yes. Month after month. Helen Chappell is the creator Would I lie to you? Not about this. of the Sam and Hollis mystery se-

Slowly, winter turned spring- ries and the Oysterback stories, as like. The snow melted. Well, most well as The Chesapeake Book of of the snow melted, but that giant the Dead. Under her pen names, snow pile never seemed to dimin- Rebecca Baldwin and Caroline ish by an inch. It just sat there like Brooks, she has published a numan ice Godzilla, big and increas- ber of historical novels. 22