A Journey Through Salisbury, Maryland of County Wicomico - The Dark Ages
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Outraged Richard takes a journey around and about the river and dale and through the metropolis of Salisbury, Maryland:
“Yea, friends and detractors, it has been years since I dared step foot into the once pleasant land of Salisbury, a little city seated in County Wicomico of the State of Maryland, but I recently returned and I shall describe the event thusly:
As we cantered along the Route of 50 in my horse drawn buggy, my traveling companion remarked how foul the air affected her dainty nose. A humid concoction of chicken manure and diesel fumes hung thick and suffocatingly in the air—an embarrassment to me and an odiousness which I attempted to divert her attention from by pointing to some of the architecture to the side of the thoroughfare.
Alas, a shambles of buildings both new and old lined the dirty road. Some in disrepair with peeling paint, rotten roofs, and long lawns. Some were new, but of the most ill conceived design I have laid eyes on—a rectangular box, essentially, with a few square holes cut for a bit of light and an engine placed on top or to the side of the box to pump and process the air from the outside to the inside. A most infernal air it was to be purified, saturated with animal filth and unburned gasoline—all coalescing and swirling over acres of black asphalt subdivided into smaller white painted rectangular boxes.
Then the people began to make themselves known to us in blatant manner as we were spectating and our horse was munching a roadside stalk of corn. A farming gentleman perched high behind us in a double wheeled extended Ford motorcar began laying into his horn creating such a racket that the nerves of my companion were frazzled, and she lay her head in her lap with hands on ears and started pulling her hair out in great plugs.
Let us pause briefly here. This fair lady who was accompanying me, quite handsome of features, had one attribute—her hair—that slightly surpassed her other virtues, if scaling judgments could even be made on such an entrancing being. Her fine strands were deep in hue and luster, an ebony brilliance the poet might say, and contained in them the very mystery of feminine delicateness. Breezes would come from afar and playfully lift her hair, producing a shimmer whilst the golden sun caressed its splendid length. When least expected, a wisp of these satin threads would brush my cheek and deepen my contemplation on the pureness of her beauty.
With some promptness, then, I reached over to hold her hands and spoke sweet words to her whilst with the other hand opened the side door of our carriage to exchange a few words with our neighbor of the road. Not halfway out I nearly lost my life. Simultaneously my ears were greeted by a deafening blast ten fold past the previous horn and my body was shaken by an incredible mass that hurtled by half a yard from my face and inches from my hand. The momentum of this bulk, as mass times speed, must have been uncountable.
I regarded the thing with astonishment as it receded into the distance, but with my wits about me I observed the shape of a section of a house and red bold letters beneath it: “Caution - Wide Load”. Verily, it appeared to be one quarter of a whole house traveling at breakneck speed down the causeway, a calculation which I arrived at by observing with incredulity, and from the safety of our buggy, the other three parts of the house following close behind.
A lull in these hurtling bodies allowed me a brief opportunity to spring out and inquire of our farmer friend what business he had with us. His offer, made intelligible and with numerous excesses of the mouth removed, was really quite simple: He would dismantle free of charge our three wheels, crash the fourth down over my head, and heave us and the whole lot into the side ditch, in exchange that we would remain as we are. I implored the man to stay his hand: that the horse was nibbling a bit of field corn, and the lady and I were observing the lay of the land, and he was our first personable encounter in this magical place.
A tolerable chap, I pronounced to my dear companion as we whipped our beast of burden to a trot and resumed our journey. Though his apology came, I explained to her, with an offer of Scrapple, eggs, and a tad of ’skrat on his account at the diner down the way and an apology to you, I was adamant that you not see his sweated shirt and mudded boot. These terms I know not of which you speak, said she. At her behest, I described the Scrapple as underutilized pig parts sliced from a dense loaf and ’skrat as short for Muskrat, a large aquatic rodent, and discouraged these foods from her diet as they were beneath her fine upbringing.
Coming by great length finally upon the town itself, or the Downtown I should say, as the town in whole was splayed out to every side so that a walking person traversing its length would surely be struck from careening vehicles or at minimum blistered and dehydrated from the trek, the Downtown was not but a loosely arranged derelict outpost that the local governance promoted as a showcase for fine and proper living. To an abandoned building, of which there were many, we tyed our equine and chariot and put on our walking wear. With fleetness of foot we rounded the outpost and took in a river length and zoo compound on one side and an expansive area on the other sides where rule of law was unknown.
The river, which they call the Wicomico, was like an aged hag that had stooled itself, a veritable cesspool that pained our nostrils and defied our vision with floating rafts of litter and leavings. The stench clung tightly to our clothing and my lady’s dress endured some splatter spots while we observed the moving mess of a river from atop a dump drain pipe. These visual and nasal agitations I apologized to her for but they paled in comparison to our witnessing of events at the captured animal display, which they called the Salisbury Zoo, that resembled, for all intents and purposes, a holocaust of the animal world.
Gaunt and staring, pacing and panting: the caged animals—the unlucky creatures who still endured their lives of torment and isolation and had not been cast onto the scrap heap—exhibited a sorrowful demeanor. Animal movements thought by the casual observer to be pleasurable or well-adapted were misinterpreted and really a morbid neurosis. The avian section along the water which we heard from afar was a caterwauling derangement of feathers and beaks scrambling about a slop of bacterial infestation. To what credit a fish or aquatic plant owed its vigor to in this foul lagoon I knew not. Here was where my formerly composured companion collapsed, and I was required to carry her limp form some ways from the calamity and wipe her brow with some bottled water.
On her reinvigoration and to our consternation, we discovered we were on the brink of the area of town that had no rule of law. Shadowy and hooded figures crept and scurried, exchanged awful glances, and cudgeled their neighbor for a dollar and killed him for two. Satiated with liquor and lotto, they stumbled along praising Jesus that better times would come afoot. Flashing lights and stern lawful voices swooped in when absolute anarchy was nigh, but they quickly retreated for fear of being assimilated by the angry unkempt mobs.
We soon made a hasty exit from the expansive Shadow Lands, as the locals fearfully called it, and upon retrieving our buggy, clopped along to another part of town where they maintain a university of education, Salisbury University: slightly less violent to the body than the Shadow Lands but more violent mentally. Here, the irrational extermination of the youthful mind occurred without pause—hypocrisy and babble ruled the day, forgetfulness and debauchery ruled the night. The grounds of the institution were pleasant for a stroll however, although contrived—even spurious.
Thus it came to pass that a visit to the mental gathering of the town, which they called the government, was called to order. We spurred our beast back to the Downtown and observed the government people crowding in to the political buildings, slapping each other on the back and speaking of boosting their wages, increasing taxes, and affording their friends opportunities to draw from the taxpayer coffers. Some of them could not enter the building for, with no exaggeration meant, they were as big as houses. Nay, larger. At this my female companion had a laughing fit and caused me to place a bag over her mouth to confine her breath and allay the affliction.
Our gaze progressed skyward and we observed money flung out from the turrets; either that or dropped via burlap bag to individuals below who made a secretive hand gesture and a bobble of the head. This, I told my traveling lass, is the Budgeting Department of which all the government people are members but none know how to operate proficiently, which, oddly enough, is the very purpose of the department. At this, she spat out a chicken bone she was delicately gnawing on and let out such a heehaw that a chicken feather previously lodged betwixt her teeth blew out and alighted on the bone she spat in the gutter. ‘Tis providence, said I, looking down at the white piece of down stuck in the chicken gristle. ‘Tis luck, said she. A vulgar display, we both agreed.
Finding our way back to the main carriage path was an ease since our horse, being a simple brute, crapped as he cantered and made an odorous path which we followed back in the dimming light. A step back in time it was, said my beautiful passenger as we regained the high road and wheeled back to Delmar, Delaware. Nay, said I, it was a reincarnation of the Dark Ages with its barbarism and ignorance but to a greater degree. Truly, a worse state will never come to this wretched land, I pondered. If God himself were to crack the Earth and drop this whole ghastly misfortune of Salisbury into an abyss, then pray, may the people spare Him the trouble and wreck the buildings, salt the land, and settle elsewhere. Perhaps, said she, but is there not hope in the most impossible of circumstances? Quite, said I, quite.”
