The Lights of Betterton
“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher.” The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The motif of lights occurs numerous times in The Great Gatsby, with the most major appearance being of the green light that Gatsby attempts to reach out to, with the green light representing Daisy. Furthermore, light also consistently appears in Gatsby’s parties. The lights symbolize the glamour and extravagance of Gatsby’s parties, which have the same beautiful nature as dreams. At the same time, the image of “lurching away from the sun” suggests gaudiness and the grotesqueness of Gatsby’s dreams and so once again we see Nick’s ambivalence as he is both attracted to and repelled by what he sees in Gatsby.” From: Mr. Hoye’s IB English Website, “The Great Gatsby: Motif Tracking – Light”
Sometime around 1950 my parents, along with my aunt and uncle, decided to buy a summer place, a pied-a-terre as the French call it, a place in the country. It was becoming quite popular then, after the war, where post-war prosperity not only allowed the purchase of a car, a washing machine, a home in the suburbs but also, when the price was right, a place “down the shore”. This would be a place to get away on the weekends, a place to take the children, that is, for us, me and my three cousins, Margaret, Tori and Mary.
An ad in the local paper described such a place on the Eastern Shore of Maryland on Grove Point by the Chesapeake Bay. This was euphemistically described as “rustic” and rustic it was. We called it “the cottage” which was a euphemism as well. Perhaps my dad and my uncle had visited it in the daylight beforehand but maybe not Despite that they purchased it, primarily because it was cheap. However, when my aunt saw it for the first time she cried. She realized that rustic meant: no electricity, no running water, no indoor “facilities”, no stove or heater, just one large room downstairs and one large, dormitory bedroom upstairs. However, it was “on the beach”, that is on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, though the water was sixty feet down a precipitous cliff to the thin shingle of a beach. At the end of the long staircase every year my father and my uncle built a pier out into the water. We called it “the dock.” Off the end of the dock, which jutted about forty feet out into the Bay, one could fish and catch crabs and tie up our small skiffs and jump into the lukewarm, brackish water of the upper Chesapeake.
The end of the dock also was somewhere you could go at night, dangle your feet over the water and look at the light from the stars. In those days there was much less light pollution and so you could see, on a clear night, the Milky Way and many of the fainter stars not visible nowadays and one could watch the moon rising in all its beautiful illusion, rising over Aberdeen and Spesutie Island across the Bay. That is where we were taught to recognize Orion the Hunter and the Great Bear with the Big Dipper within it and how to find Polaris from them. My father said, “If you can find Polaris, you will never be lost.” if you looked north, you could see the ship-channel navigation lights and the Turkey Point lighthouse and if you looked south you could see the lights of Betterton.
Betterton was a remnant of the golden age of steamboat excursions on the Chesapeake. However, by 1950 Betterton was only a some houses and a few places persisting in its image of a place where one might have a good time on a Saturday night. There were a sprinkling of taverns, a dance hall, a bowling alley and amusement arcade, though most of these had long since dissipated into the mists of the early morning fogs of the adjacent Sassafras River. Because it was only two miles across the water as a duck flies, one could, on a still night, hear the music from the bars and the dance hall and see the shimmering lights winking at you across the water. And like the lights of Gatsby’s parties across the Sound, the lights of Betterton symbolized the glamor and good times of a place where one could get a drink and dance the night away and maybe a carrousel ride for the kids. Yet, it was a difficult crossing at night, those two miles, and to travel by car meant 26 miles of narrow, high-crowned country roads in the dark. That made it too far away, too distant, too remote for the parents to venture out and impossible to attain for the children. While the lights of Gatsby’s mansion were attractive and repellant to Nick, to us the lights of Betterton were only attractive and the only repellant was the Off that we daubed on ourselves to repel the mosquitoes. And so we sat on the dock and dejectedly thought of all the fun we were missing, the fun other people and other kids must be having across the water in Betterton.
As the years passed by and we, the children, approached adolescence the issue became one of peer envy. No, not pier envy for the neighbors didn’t even have a dock, but rather, back in Philly, our friends were going “down the shore”, that is to Ocean City, to Margate, to Wildwood, and especially to Sommer’s Point. They would go back to school on Monday and tell of the wondrous parties they attended, the summer flirtations, the place when you could get beer in Sommer’s Point if you had a friend that looked old enough and a fake I.D. They told stories of how much fun the boardwalk was, where you could get cotton candy and saltwater taffy and ride the bumper cars and run across the hot sand and jump against the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. None of these things we knew but Betterton was likely a lot more fun.
And here we were, stuck in this outpost of civilization being bitten by Maryland mosquitoes. What fun was that? Why, we had to make our own fun. We had to learn to play bridge and canasta by kerosene lamplight before we got electricity. And on a rainy day, we had to play Monopoly and Clue against our cousins. With electricity we could now read into the night, as late as we wanted: The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift. We had to build campfires on the beach from driftwood on the shore and then toast marshmallows on sassafras twigs. For that matter, we learned that sassafras made the best twigs for roasting hot dogs and marshmallows. And we had to listen to the radio for it was too far to receive any TV signal. It was WBAL from Baltimore, about the only station we could pick up on our “A and B” battery powered radio and with that we heard Bob and Ray on the Monitor Radio Network. Sure it was fun to catch fish and crabs but one had to prepare the fish and pick the crabmeat and to learn the differences of male and female crabs so as to throw the latter back into the Bay. We had to learn to sail the little catboat and paddle the kayak but not go too far from shore. And when a big, ladened tanker came up the Inland Waterway, the cry would go out, “Here comes a big one” and we would grab our innertubes and paddle out and ride the waves as they came crashing to the shore. At the edge of the cliff one could grab the binoculars and watch as the oil tankers plowed up the ship channel and recognize the countries of their owners by the flags they flew. Oh, it wasn’t fair! Our friends had all the fun!
We sold the cottage in the late 60s. Our trips were becoming more infrequent and the necessities of its upkeep more burdensome. My family has more stories and has had more laughs about the cottage on the Chesapeake than any other event in our lives. And though we never made it to Betterton we still think about how much excitement we missed across the Bay.