The Best Policy

Friday morning I took a spin down Knight Woods road and was compelled by the morning light to photograph this house. When I got out of the car, a most unexpected and sudden thing happened for a chilly, spring Mathews morning: mosquitoes descended like the plague the flying monkeys on the Wizard of Oz.

Out of nowhere they came, with a vengeance. Relentless they were. Bigger than buzzards.

Speaking of old houses but not necessarily of winged monkeys or buzzards, the other day I alluded to a story involving the Chesapeake Bay Children, me, the law and a stroke. I've been meaning to relay this story for a while but never seem to have time to breathe accomplish what I set out to do.

Once upon a recent Sunday, I forced the Chesapeake Bay Children to ride with me to Bethel Beach. The weather was warm and the sunlight was perfect for photographs.

On our way they tolerated a few stops here and there for the occasional photo of dead houses barely noticeable to the human eye visible from the road and certainly not something most people stop to pay attention to.

But they're accustomed to these sorts of pit stops. Usually they roll their eyes and say something like, "Oh no, Mom. Again?"

On the way to Bethel, I told them about a shack in the middle of the woods on the left as you approach the beach. I described a grass-covered access off the paved road which would allow us to pull in under cover of dense pine trees and vegetation which hides everything, up to and including the shack I wanted to photograph.

Here's how that conversation went:

Chesapeake Bay Mother: "Oh, yeah. I want to show y'all this beautiful old shack in the woods here. All I have to do is pull right in here and it's right over there." (I gesture randomly towards an area that appears to be nothing but trouble a thicket.)

CB Children: "Oh no, Mom. Again?"

CB Mother: "It's OK. It's right over there."

CB Son, demonstrating sound judgment: "Mom, no. I don't think so."

CB Mother: "I've done this before, it's fine. We're down here in the middle of nowhere, the car is hidden, and the shack is right over there (gesturing towards nothing but dense vegetation, poison ivy, and briars). The lighting is perfect. This will only take a minute, and I'd really like you all to see it."

CB Children: Cut glances at each other and make a pact never to go anywhere with their mother again.

CB Mother: Parks the car under thick brush and pine trees. Leads the children a few steps towards the shack, which is hidden in a very dense Amazon Jungle forest.

All of a sudden, Chesapeake Bay Mother and her trained ear could hear a car coming, but just barely.

CB Mother, without the benefit of even seeing the shack, much less sharing it with her children: " OK, let's go back to the car, kids. I hear a car approaching."

CB Son: "Oh no."

CB Daughter: "Oh, brother, not this."

CB Mother, thinking to herself but not daring to utter the words out loud: "Jeeminy mahsters Uh oh, oh no, and why does this stuff tend to happen to me?"

Then, just as she and her children were hurdling brush piles to get back to the car, right there, screeching on brakes in front of us, was a Mathews County deputy who had descended with the swiftness and ferocity of a winged monkey those unexpected mosquitoes mentioned earlier.

He was looking right at us. It's not like there was any other reason for him to stop. Deputies don't stop for fiddler crabs, and they don't stop for horseflies, sea gulls, herons or hard crabs. Those would have been the only other living beings there that day on this very remote, desolate road going into Bethel Beach.

CB Mother, with beads of sweat on her forehead and a new appreciation for Valium attention to cardiac health: "It's OK. It will be fine. I can handle this. I'm just going to tell him the truth, which is we just wanted to take some pictures of the lovely shack in these woods."

CB Daughter, with the line of the day: "The truth is always best."

CB Mother, noting to self: This child has more sense than her mother, and this is a miracle a wonderful thing.

Chesapeake Bay Woman trotted nervously with her camera held high so the law enforcement official could see. Her darling, level-headed children were trotting in lockstep behind her. She had every intention of walking up to the law enforcement officer and telling him everything because the only logical explanation was to plead insanity the truth.

But then, all of a sudden, the last possible thing imaginable happened. He took off! Just like that. He didn't even say hello. (I'm not complaining, it was just a little unusual.)

Yes indeed. Without even asking what we were doing, he left, but not after studying the whole scene carefully. He must have taken one look at a crazy frazzled, sweaty, camera-wielding woman herding children out of a dense Amazon Jungle forest and assumed, correctly, that we were not doing anything too terribly illegal awful.

Then Chesapeake Bay Woman, realizing her children have more sense than she has her luck was running thin, packed her children in the car and headed home.

The End.