Stephen G. Uhler, our long-time Country Philosopher, who replaced Jack Rue upon the Naval Aviator's death in 1998, has been losing his eyesight, thus the many repeated columns...he is now retiring from writing this column prior to kicking the bucket, which is the way it should have happened...if Uhler figures out how to feed his hogs and use a voice activated computer at the same time, he vows to return to the calling of William Shakespeare and other imposters

"ERSTERS AND TROUTLINES"

Likely long-gone now in St. Mary’s is the peculiar dialect many were once heard to speak here. I say peculiar, not in the sense of strange, but rather in the sense of singular, not spoken elsewhere in my experience. The closest to it would be the patois of the backwoods Appalachian mountain folks I’ve heard on ethnologists’ recordings and in introductions to old-time fiddle and banjo tunes they sang. The St. Mary’s dialect was different however, more Elizabethan English with that sort-of gentle Tidewater slide to it.

In my youth, there were still some elders puttering around in fields and on deadrises that spoke in that fashion. For better or worse, these folks (the men, at least) were people of few words anyway and nods of the head, a wink here and there and some very short, simple sentences conveyed about all they saw fit and found necessary. And since most of those they spoke to were of like dispositions and they were so well-known to each other, they’d long-ago said much of what they had to say anyway, and there was little need for much detailed discussion.

These were pretty much "gee" and "haw" folks and simply "supper" conveyed what was required to tell one where they were headed. And "supper" was to be had "come hame." "Sturm comin’," uttered quietly meant making a run for it if it appeared to the weepy red-tinged expert eye (no sunglasses they), barely visible under a broad-brimmed and tattered straw, that your day on the River was at end.

All this was due to a geographical reality: St. Mary’s was long on the way to nowhere else. These folks had been born and raised here for generation after generation, on the same land and among those just like them. Remember, just as St. Mary’s, Solomon’s also was the end of the road and a recent trip up what’s now Rte. 2 to Annapolis, reminded that the "Old Solomon’s Island Road," which now crosses the "New" road 8 or 9 times, followed farmers’ field lines, not anything like straight line. Crops and livelihoods they provided were much more important than roads! Imagine that.

And in St. Mary’s the same applied. Not much need to go "fur" up the road anyway. They did put that draw-bridge in at Benedict in the late 20’s, but the Thomas Johnson Bridge wasn’t even an idea. You crossed the Patuxent by boat or not at all. Old Rte. 5 from Leonardtown and Three-Notch Road from what became Lexington Park weren’t much more than what passes for a poorly maintained farm lane of today. Pot holes, alternating dust and mud, washouts and rising freshets were always in contention with the traveler who didn’t come and go the old-fashioned way – by water, by sail or steamboat.

There was no radio or television and even when they came, reception was sketchy. Telephones came, roads were macadamed, the Base was established and St. Mary’s gradually became connected to the outside world. With the influx of new people and more convenient access elsewhere, folks more and more heard others who spoke what we’d call either "standard English" required of media voices or the multitude of other dialects used by those who came from elsewhere. Gradually, but ever so surely, the St. Mary’s County dialect died-out in a couple of generations with the exposure to those who spoke differently. Increased years of schooling, mandated by law, and machines’ reduction in the need for children to work the family farm, kept kids in school most through high school and under the sustained influence of teachers whose speech patterns were maintained with a rigor unknown among today’s educators. Their parents’ and certainly their grandparents’ way of speaking was likely viewed with respect, was understood, but was not taken up as theirs. It’s almost like what I’ve observed with many second and third-generation emigrants who can understand their parents’ or grandparents’ foreign tongue, but can’t speak it themselves.

Despite this, especially among some of our older natives even today, a bit of the old way sneaks in, almost unnoticed unless one’s ear recognizes it for what it is.

The likely most common of these is the word "ersters." Sometimes heard still in the remoter parts of the Eastern Shore also, this refers to the sorely dimmished bivalve which once was the backbone of the whole Chesapeake Bay fisheries industry.

The other coming readily to mind, having heard it just the other day, is "trout line." As best I know, this is the same as a "trot line." Don’t bother to look either up in your dictionary; they’re not there, neither of them. For those uninitiates among us, what we’re talking about is a long length of string or waxed cord which is anchored at both ends marked by floats, from which at intervals bait is suspended below the water surface. Working this whole get-up is a waterman in a small boat with at rolling pulley-like mechanism attached to the gunnel, which raises the line above water as the boat proceeds down-throttle, slowly and methodically back and forth the length of the line. As the baited line rises with a crab hungrily hanging-on to his bait meal, the waterman gently dips him up by net and into a bushel-basket. This process is repeated until no crabs appear or the waterman tires of the task. A "trout line," you say; no trout in this any way. No rainbows, browns here and our sea-trout aren’t the prey. Best I can figure, "trout" is indeed "trot" and this refers to the slow pace the boat must travel to successfully work the line. It likely reflects the boat speed, more than a walk, less than a run. Before outboards became universal, I recall watching with awe a neighbor working his rig propelling his skiff by skulling with one hand and dipping the crabs with his net in the other. That was an ancient ballet now sadly lost that I’m sure had been performed for hundreds of years, prosaicly and without notice on the St. Mary’s and everywhere down here. Its pure beauty on a glassy surface, virtually soundless, is a memory I retain fondly to this day.

For those uninitiates who wonder what a "gunnel" is, it’s the side of the boat. As to "skulling," it’s likely a lost art of actually propelling the boat forward by an oar set in an oarlock at the stern and magically rotating the oar in sort of an elongated figure-8 fashion. I can describe it; I despair of doing it; and so likely will anyone who’s reading this. Like a magician’s tricks, you see it with your own eyes; it was done; but dammed if you could do it yourself.

Trout lines and ersters stubbornly remain. Skulling, except in name, done gone.

Thus ends my lesson.

A Doc. Shortage:

Hospitals and physician groups moan and groan about not enough docs staying in Maryland to practice?

A reason why? Just peek at the rolls of exotic names of med-school students and you might wonder where all those children, grandchildren and great-grand children of local physicians, bred to medicine, go to med. school. Deep-rooted Maryland dynastic doctor families of earlier times must survive to some extent, so perhaps their scions are relegated to the Timbuktu or Guadalajara Med. School now, and their practices elsewhere.

Maryland taxpayers foot a good part of the bill at the University of Maryland Medical School, so why not give qualified Maryland-born applicants a big break on admissions and financial aid? We need to re-align our "preferences" with Maryland’s needs and, as once was the case by geographic happenstance and less-global transience, give priority to those that have deep roots here and are least likely to pick-up and leave.

Maybe, just maybe, its high time – at least for all State-supported schools – to concentrate on turning-out home-grown docs (Nurses and a multitude of other short-supply Health care and non-health care professionals) and forget "diversity," "grant-chasing,"esoteric "research," and "national rankings" as these schools’ real reasons for existence. Leave that for Johns Hopkins, maybe.

Tax payers suffer these gratuitous ambitions at their expense and pray they’ll not fall victim to the results of all this self-promoting, political correctness. And naturally, the poor docs, always overworked, impoverished and avoiding inconvenience to themselves, in chorus with put-upon hospitals suggest others foot the whole bill. Nothing new about that.

Are we so lacking in qualified Marylanders wanting to become physicians that we need look elsewhere to fill State-subsidized med. school seats? I hope not, but if we are, a shortage of physicians is but another symptom of a much more disastrous problem for our society as a whole.

Even to suggest such is isolationist, even Xenophobic or reactionary, and will bring forth self-righteous howls from comfortable, devoted aherents to these same prevailing pretexts everywhere in State professional and undergrad schools. That said, it doesn’t make things other than they are or provide any kind of solution to the public’s unmet needs.