St. Michaels, MD to Lewes, Delaware
Last morning in St. Michaels. No FAA restrictions, nobody around to tell me not to fly, and a quiet harbor doing the thing a quiet harbor does in November. I took the DJI Mini 4 Pro up one more time, got the aerial perspective I’d been wanting, and called Maryland mostly done.
The hook, for what it’s worth, is that I have no hook. It’s episode eighty-one of a project that started as a checklist and turned into something I’m still in the middle of understanding. I don’t have anything particularly profound to say about that today. What I have is drone footage of a sleepy Chesapeake harbor town and a road heading north.
Chesapeake City
I could have driven straight to Delaware. I did not drive straight to Delaware.
The Chesapeake Bay splits into peninsulas and coves and small towns that seem to exist slightly outside of regular time, and veering off the efficient route through this part of Maryland is always the correct call. I ended up in Chesapeake City, a small town split directly down the middle by the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal — one of the busiest commercial shipping routes in the country, running right through what is essentially a village. I took the drone up to get a bird’s-eye view of what that actually looks like. The answer is: improbable. A massive shipping channel, the scale of it clearly industrial, and on both sides small painted Victorian houses and a main street at postcard scale.
I didn’t stay long. The cold was still doing its thing and I wasn’t quite feeling like talking to anyone. I just wanted the view.
A week had passed since the election. Driving through this part of Maryland, I noticed the signage — heavily in one direction, much more so than anything I’d seen in New England. I filed it as an observation and kept driving. The country is a complicated place. That’s probably the most honest thing I can say about it.
Lewes, Delaware
The manager at the oyster bar that evening asked how I’d known to come to Lewes. Said it was one of the best places in Delaware, that not many people knew about it. I told him I’d done a little research. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was AI.
Lewes — pronounced Lewis, which I never quite sorted out on the day — is the first town of the first state, something I had actually written in my own blog post months earlier and then completely forgotten until I saw a clock on the wall that said it. Delaware was the first state to ratify the Constitution. Lewes was the first European settlement in Delaware, founded by the Dutch in 1631. These facts were apparently in my notes the whole time.
I came over a bridge into town in the early evening and missed the historic district entirely, a mistake I corrected on foot after checking in. What I found walking back across the bridge was a small downtown decorated for the holidays, Christmas lights going up in real time — workers out on ladders, stringing lights along the storefronts while I walked through with the action cam in night mode. The lights reflecting off car windshields, warm windows, a main street that felt genuinely lit rather than lit for effect. I’m a lighting designer. I notice these things. This one was good.
I ate at the Lewes Oyster House and sat at the bar watching the guys put the last of the lights up outside through the window. The oyster shucker was working steadily. A guy who might have been the manager or the server or both suggested I go to Milton, a nearby town he called a hidden gem, and also to get into the state park I’d driven past without stopping. He said it had been 75 degrees just the day before. I had caught it at the exact right moment.
I walked back over the bridge to the hotel around the time the shivering started. Small town. Christmas lights. Oysters. Everything reflecting the way good light does on a cold night. That’s the whole episode. Sometimes that’s enough.
Drone flight in the morning before the president rolls into town and restricts the airspace.
