“I recommend three Maryland beaten biscuits, with water, for your breakfast. They are hard as a haul-seiner’s conscience and dry as a dredger’s tongue, and they sit for hours in your morning stomach like ballast on a tender ship’s keel. They cost little, are easily and crumblessly carried in your pockets, and if forgotten and gone stale, are neither harder nor less palatable than when fresh. […] Few things are stable in this world. Your morning stomach, reader, ballasted with

On the horizon, a light appears, glowing and neon. Something about the quality of the light makes it seem unnatural and foreign. What appears is not a headlight, not a flashlight, not a plane, not a lighthouse. The light dances about. It races forward at an incredible speed. It flickers off and disappears. This seems like a scene from the 1977 Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but it is also a real event that took place in the summer of 1952 in Wicomic

deadly nightshade / belladonna (Atropa belladonna) Legend has it that belladonna was one of the ingredients in the special ointment witches produced to grant themselves the ability to fly. Whether this actually meant physical or psychotropic flying has been a matter of historical and moral debate for centuries. What we now know is that belladonna contains numerous powerful phytochemical alkaloids which profoundly alter central nervous system function. Two of its tropane alkal

Interested in learning a new skill this fall? Maybe you want to prepare for a zombie apocalypse or whatever other ghosts and goblins your imagination conjures up this Halloween. If so, axe throwing is definitely for you. Battle Axe, Delaware’s first competitive axe throwing establishment — just a short drive from the Shore in Newark, Del. — promises to help you unleash your inner Viking or at least help burn off a few calories after eating too much candy corn. “If you want to

In the marshes and swamps around Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, a ghost lurks. Or so local lore would have you believe. To find her, drive south from Cambridge on Bucktown Road, through flat farmland and patches of woods for about ten miles, until you arrive at the narrow Decoursey Bridge Road. The actual bridge isn’t long, just enough to get over a narrow strip of the Transquaking River. At night, the river is black and the surroundings dark. The marshy Green Brier swa

The house on a slight rise at the end of Cherry Street on St. Michaels’ harbor was originally known as the Henry Clay Dodson House. It is a landmark in St. Michaels for its French Second Empire style with a remarkable mansard roof covered by deep gray fish-scale patterned slate shingles. Between each arched roof dormer window is an unusual painted accent shingle with a gray center surrounded in white. Other period details include the Ionic columns that support the one-story p

There are signs of autumn on the Eastern Shore that tell us the seasons are unmistakably changing — the widening vees of southbound geese, the ghostly mists that form over cool morning coves, the scores of wooly bears hustling plushly across the road. On the Chester River, fall is heralded by the arrival of tall ships, sails bellied full as they head to Sultana’s annual Downrigging Weekend Tall Ship and Wooden Boat Festival. Now in its 18th year, Downrigging is a celebration