Treasure

I took this at Aaron's Beach this past weekend when gale force winds were blowing through; sand pelted my bare legs. If you double click on the image, you can just see the white caps on the bay. This was one of those days when people around here might say it was blowin' so hard there were white caps in the toilet.

Here lately, I've been giving a whole lot of thought to ways of earning extra money. Most of these thoughts involve highly unlikely scenarios, such as winning the lottery that I rarely play; shaking hands with and accepting an over sized check from Ed McMahon because I won a sweepstakes I didn't enter.

Or, sometimes I dream that I'm going to find buried treasure.

With so many stories floating around Mathews of pirates and buried treasure, I've decided that indeed there has to be something of value buried around here somewhere. And I'm going to be the person to find it, even though I don't know how. Or where, but I've narrowed it down to off Gwynn's Island or down Haven Beach.

Last year I wrote about the Haven Beach ghost story, and its associated buried treasure. Today I'll share an excerpt about buried treasure from the booklet "Memories of a Gwynn's Island Childhood," by Jean Sparrow Pendleton, published by the Gwynn's Island Museum.

(Note to Blog Fest guests: I am hoping the museum will be a stop on our tour. If I win the lottery, I'll drive you there in a limousine. In the meantime I hope a Saturn will do.)

"....Because of the long history of pirates who sailed the Chesapeake Bay area, many tales of buried chests circulated around the island. My grandma, Susan Sparrow, told one from personal experience. She used to visit Cherry Point as a young girl, and she remembered taking a walk one day over to the bay side on the beach, where she saw a ship anchored off the island. A smaller boat was coming toward the shore with one black man and two white men in it. Grandma was scared but curious, so she hid behind a clump of bushes and watched to see what the men would do. They came ashore, walked off so many paces from a marked spot, and began digging. They eventually pulled up some sort of chest, put it in the boat and promptly left!...."

"...I can also remember many stories about an old chest that lay buried somewhere around the black beacon just outside the harbor, right off Cherry Point. Many old-timers claimed that they could see it in the winter when the water was clear. Several tried to get it up out of the water, but it was too heavy and too well into the sand for them to move it. My father saw it several times. Over the years, as the channel deepened, the chest finally disappeared, and is probably still down there today, full of its secret treasures!"

So, folks, there you have it. There's loot buried all around us here in Mathews. Hopefully I'll find it some day, probably around the same day as I win that lottery or sweepstakes.