The 42nd Parallel

The Camera Eye (9)

all day the fertilizerfactories smelt something awful and at night the cabin was full of mosquitoes fit to carry you away but it was Crisfield on the Eastern Shore and if we had a gasoline boat to carry them across the bay here we could ship our tomatoes and corn and early peaches ship ’em clear to New York instead of being jipped by the commissionmerchants in Baltimore we’d run a truck farm ship early vegetables irrigate fertilize enrich the tobacco-exhausted land of the Northern Neck if we had a gasoline boat we’d run oysters in her in winter raise terrapin for the market

but up the freight siding I got talking to a young guy couldn’t have been much older ’n me was asleep in one of the boxcars asleep right there in the sun and the smell of cornstalks and the reek of rotting menhaden from the fertilizer factories he had curly hair and wisps of hay in it and through his open shirt you could see his body was burned brown to the waist I guess he wasn’t much account but he’d bummed all way from Minnesota he was going south and when I told him about Chesapeake Bay he wasn’t surprised but said I guess it’s too fur to swim it I’ll git a job in a menhaden boat