Four men in their seventies are at another table at the café. For a while they talk about a trip one of them took to the mountains, and he describes the farms out there, the slopes and crops, the height of the corn and the how dry the air is and the effect of the lack of humidity on the growth. He saw some pheasants and deer, and he saw some cottonwoods which if you cut it up for firewood will quickly rot if it gets wet. It was a bus trip, and he must admit he spent a good deal of time sleeping on the bus. 

Then they talk about dead friends, two of whom passed last week. Both had cancer and one is believed to have caught it in Vietnam. The dead vet’s wife is in hospice and doesn’t know he died. “Doesn’t know he was sick,” says another. “Doesn’t know she was married!” laughs a third and they all laugh until one shakes his head and says, “Shame really. Such a loving couple.” They are quiet a bit and sip their coffee. It’s raining today, and it isn’t hot. It’s cold in the cafe and I wear a sweatshirt. 

Then they talk about boats. 

People in Deltaville for the most part are farmers or watermen, often both. Corn, butter beans, soybeans, tomatoes, wheat, flounder, bass, oysters. Crabs. Inevitably, the talk turns toward the commercial fishing conglomerate in Reedville up the bay that’s been fishing the mouth of the Rap for menhaden for well more than a hundred years and were out there in their fleet of ships again this morning. Omega Protein cooks and grinds the fish for nutritional supplements as well as feed for livestock. No one eats menhaden except the larger fish, in particular bluefish and bass, but they’re a cash cow for fish oil. Still, the watermen will tell you the truth, that the fish of the bay are being starved off because of the over farming of menhaden. One guy’s grandson is working out there on the boats holding the tubes that suck up the millions of small fish out of the nets and pumps them through a filter system and then into the hold. The fleet pulls out five hundred metric tons of the little suckers every year.

“Down at the mouth of the bay, and up bay in Maryland, those fishermen doing okay. We’re dying here in mid-Chesapeake,” one says. He eats a breakfast wrap the sole worker walks back. She hands him a small bag of chips and says she didn’t forget, and they all laugh.  

Then one of the men sees the college sticker on the back of my laptop. 

“Bob, you work at that college? I heard you’re a professor.”

“I am.”

He nodded. 

“My wife read one of your books. Got it at the library.”

“Well. Thank her.”

He nodded.

“Wayne would read it,” says another, “but he only knows so many words.” They all laugh. Oh, these men read. The details and depth of their knowledge of weather, sea conditions, fishing practices, equipment updates, agricultural spill, fertilizer, engines, oyster conditions, and more is extensive, and I’ll turn toward them for what the weather will be like in the next week quicker than any other source. 

“So you been to Siberia?” Wayne asks. Before I can answer, another points out the obviousness of the question, but Wayne says he’s just making conversation.

“I have.”

“I ain’t been nowhere. The mountains on a bus trip. Fredericksburg once.”

“And Richmond, Wayne. You went to Richmond that time.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this contrast. I’ve been around the block, and a significant number of my neighbors have not been very far at all. Growing up it perplexed me. The world is massive, with so much variety in people, vistas, foods, customs, and more that to spend your life not exploring seemed a waste of a life, like vacationing in London but only going to see Big Ben every day. 

But we’re just curious about different things, is all. I can navigate easily through more than a few foreign countries. So can these men; foreign to me, anyway. From Reedville to Havre de Grace, Tangier to Cape Charles, and Windmill Point to Point Comfort and on, dead reckoning if they must, navigating the depths and dangers beneath them, the changes in the tide, the wind, the mood.

Oh these men read. They read the clouds and can communicate the narrative arc of storms, they read the waves and the tides and can tell what the antagonist will be today, when the skies will clear, when the flounder will return, when to head home early and when to push it.

They are masters at their lives, and while they are often prisoners to the weather (and international conglomerates), they are, most of them, still their own bosses with boats much more costly than my home.

These guys killing time at the café are part of the backbone of this country, and we’re sitting a few hundred yards from the famed Stingray Point where, according to spurious accounts, John Smith was stung by a stingray. They walk into the café or the convenience store or IGA in work boots, sometimes raincoats.

One complains again about Omega. “I saw them out off Windmill again, five am.”

“Come on Jimmy. You know as well as me if you had the money to get one of them boats they got you’d be sucking up the menhaden too. Sheeet.”

“You go out today?”

“Yeah, Out and back.”

“Anything?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I suppose.”

They sit quietly and Wayne shows a picture on his phone of the bus he rode with his wife and a group to the mountains.

“You working on some new bestseller Bob?”

“Not today,” I say.

“Tomorrow then,” he says, and nods.